Reverse Engineering of Polymers Using Nanoscale IR Spectroscopy

A recent publication in Spectroscopy Europe by lead authors from Kimberly Clark Corporation showed the use of AFM based nanoscale IR Spectroscopy for reverse engineering of polymeric multilayer films.

The Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) is a fairly common nanoscale characterization technique but its main drawback to date was its inability to provide chemical composition information from a sample.

By combining the AFM with a tunable Infrared (IR) source, IR spectra with nanoscale spatial resolution can be collected.

As film thicknesses in multilayer films continue to shrink, AFM-IR provides an important capability for sample analysis.

According to the lead author, Tom Eby of Kimberly Clark Corporation, “‘Reverse engineering based on IR is an important application in most industrial labs and the spatial resolution breakthrough of the AFM-IR technique now enables this for a wide range of materials with sub-micron features.’’

The paper titled “ Reverse engineering of polymeric multilayers using AFM-based nanoscale IR spectroscopy and thermal analysis ” was published in the June issue of Spectroscopy Europe.

The authors used a combination of AFM-IR and nanoscale thermal analysis to obtain both infrared spectra and transition temperatures of each layer in a cross-sectioned multilayer film.

From the combination of the two measurement techniques they were able to identify the six layers which included composite thin films.