Synchrotron X-ray tomography for 3D chemical diffusion measurement of a flame retardant in polystyrene

In an on-going tomographic project, material properties of industrial polymer blends are being studied. This project uses 3D chemical analysis techniques to look at a polymer additive problem called blooming, related to the theory of aging and diffusion in glassy materials. The 3D images are acquired with synchrotron X-ray tomography because of its rapidity, good spatial resolution, large field-of-view, and elemental sensitivity. To investigate the chemical process of blooming, new procedures are developed to assess the flame retardant distribution as a function of annealing time in the sample. With the spatial chemical distribution we fit the concentrations to a diffusion equation to each time step in the annealing process. In this preliminary work, we study the dissolutions of a non-blooming flame retardant.