Rubber and elastomer products are used as functional parts and are used in many electronic equipments or automobiles. The manufacturer of the rubber and elastomer products evaluates those materials in the point of view of materials development, development of products, cause investigation of the product troubles.

In market transactions, product certification, performance indication, etc. are necessary, which is a measure of cost/purchase availability. The user is evaluating product confirmation, product abnormality, cause investigation for trouble occurrence, and so on.

In this way, rubber products need to be evaluated in various situations throughout their lives from raw materials to disposal.

Rubber materials are composed of various compounds such as cross-linked polymers, additives, and fillers. It is difficult to analyze such materials in their normal state because of lack of volatility and solubility, and time-consuming and cumbersome sample pretreatment is inevitably required depending on the type of analytical methods. However, pyrolysis (Py) of rubber materials under inert gas decomposes them into many individual fragments, which can be separated and identified by GC/MS. Thus, Py-GC/MS can directly analyze materials without any sample pretreatment and is quite useful for the characterization of polymer and copolymer materials including additives and fillers. This article reviews Py-GCMS analysis of rubber materials, such as determination of rubber types, quantification of composition ratio of copolymers, and qualitative and quantitative analysis of compounded additives.

This article summarizes the basic principles of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and temperature-modulated DSC (TMDSC) as well as the application of these techniques to polymeric materials or rubbers (elastomers). The determination of glass transition temperature T_g and the heat capacity difference ΔC_p at T_g is crucial to elucidate the amorphous structure of polymers and polymer blends when using thermal analysis. In addition, enthalpy relaxation and thermal history must be considered in order to determine these thermal properties. In particular, TMDSC is a powerful technique to obtain highly sensitive and valuable information about the amorphous structure of polymers. The volume V_α of the cooperatively rearranging region of chloroprene rubbers was determined as a function of crystallinity using TMDSC. Based on the findings that the V_α decreases with increasing crystallinity, the amorphous region of chloroprene rubbers is suggested to be restrained by the cross-link of the crystal.

Currently, polymers are widely used as materials for products and parts because of their ease of molding processability and suitable mechanical strength. Measurement of average molecular weight and molecular weight distribution of polymers is indispensable for managing the quality of these products. Size exclusion chromatography (SEC) is widely applied to measurement of polymers because information on average molecular weight and molecular weight distribution can be obtained at the same time by a simple method and precise measurement is also possible. In this chapter, the fundamental principle of SEC and tips on molecular weight measurement of polymers are introduced.

Infrared spectroscopy (IR) is a useful tool to identify unknown substances. In addition, it is easy to handle even for beginners of chemical analysis. In this review, the basics of several recent applications of IR such as photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS), Attenuated total refrection (ATR) imaging and atomic force microscope (AFM)-IR are introduced.

Controlling domain structure, filler network and their boundary in nanometer and micrometer scale is necessary for development of new generation materials. Not only visualizing their morphology, also quantifying mechanical properties is important for understanding of relationship between molecular structure and bulk properties. This article provides an overview of some techniques for measuring mechanical properties using atomic force microscopy/scanning probe microscopy. Cantilever-based indentation can be used to obtain elastic modulus by assuming contact mechanics. Conventional phase imaging in tapping mode provides information about loss tangent. A bimodal AM-FM technique has advantages for fast and high-resolution imaging of elastic and dissipative properties.

An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a higher resolving power than light microscopes and can reveal the structure of smaller objects. In particular, in this report, we introduce preprocessing methods and observation cases specialized in soft materials such as plastics and rubber.