Mechanical Spectroscopy

Mechanical Spectroscopy or Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) is a technique that is commonly used to characterize viscoelastic properties of polymer materials. The method is especially useful for addressing problems, in which the contributions of particular molecular motions or structural rearrangements are of interest. In such cases information from many other methods (NMR, DSC, X-ray diffraction, dielectric relaxation, etc.) are combined in order to make assignments of particular microscopic motions to the macroscopically observed relaxation of the material. Of particular interest are heterogeneous or structured polymer systems like copolymers, gels, or polymers with complex topology.