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This book, now in its 4th edition provides a central source of information of tried and tested techniques on the analysis of rubber and rubber-like polymers with an impartial assessment of their validity. Rubber products are ubiquitous and impinge daily on all aspects of life. They range from health-related and medical products through literally hundreds of components in every motor vehicle to heavy engineering products such as earthquake-resistant bearings which form the foundations of a growing number of buildings. Each product may contain up to a dozen chemicals, selected from a range of thousands, which are added in such a way that the final vulcanised article has certain pre-defined properties. This unique book continues the tradition of the earlier editions by providing a systemic analytical approach to answering virtually any query about the composition of a rubber product, its safety for a specific purpose or its reason for failing in service. It is essential reading for anyone working in the area of rubber product manufacture or commercial usage.
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Analysis of Rubber-like Rubber and Polymers Fourth Edition M.J.R. Loadman KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN O 412 81970 8 Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. Printed in The UK Preface The first edition of this book (1958) described an analytical situation which had existed for a number of years for maintaining quality control on vulcanizates of natural rubber although the situation had recently been disturbed by the introduction of a range of synthetic rubbers which required identification and quantitative estimation. For the former purpose 'wet' chemistry, based on various imperfectly understood organic reactions, was pressed into service. Alongside this was the first introduction of instrumental analysis, using the infrared spectra of either the polymers or, more usually, their pyrolytic products to 'fingerprint7 the material. The identification of a range of organic accelerators, antioxidants and their derivatives which had been introduced during the 1920s and 30s was, in the first edition, dealt with by a combination of column chromatography and infrared spectroscopy or by paper chromatography. Quantitative procedures were, however, still classical in the tradition of gravimetric or volumetric assays with an initially weighed sample yielding, after chemical manipulation, a carefully precipitated, dried and weighed end product, or a solution of known composition whose weight or titre, as a percentage of the initial sample, quantified the function being determined. The second edition of this work (1968) consolidated the newer techniques which had been introduced in the first without adding to them although, in other applications of analytical chemistry, instrumental analysis had already brought about a transformation in laboratory practice. In 1983 the third edition was published and gave full credit to modern instrumentation in all spheres of the analysis of rubber and rubber-like polymers, describing