The pursuit of the golden balance between oversimplification and overload with theory has always been the primary goal of every author of book on rheology. Rheology: Concepts, Methods, and Applications, Second Edition is a tool for chemists and chemical engineers to solve many practical problems. They have to learn what to measure, how to measure, and what to do with the data. But, the learning process should not take users away from their major goals, such as manufacturing quality products, developing new materials, analysis of material durability. In the book various aspects of theoretical rheology as well as methods of measurement and raw data treatment and how to use rheological methods in different groups of products are discusses. The authors share their experiences of many years of experimental studies and teaching to show use of rheology in studies of materials. They and were very meticulous in giving historical background of contributors to rheology as a science and as the method of solving many practical problems. This book is very useful as a teaching tool in universities and colleges because it is consistent with programs of rheology courses. Practicality of this book will prepare students for typical tasks in industry. Equally it serves the industry and accomplished rheologists because it contains expert advice of two very famous and accomplished scientists and teachers who know discoveries first-hand because they may have taken part in some of them.
Polymers selected for this edition of the Handbook of Polymers include all major polymeric materials used by the plastics and other branches of the chemical industry as well as specialty polymers used in the electronics, pharmaceutical, medical, and space fields. Extensive information is included on biopolymers. The data included in the Handbook of Polymers come from open literature (published articles, conference papers, and books), literature available from manufacturers of various grades of polymers, plastics, and finished products, and patent literature. The above sources were searched, including the most recent literature. It can be seen from the references that a large portion of the data comes from information published in 2011. This underscores one of the major goals of this undertaking, which is to provide readers with the most up-to-date information. Frequently, data from different sources vary in a broad range and they have to be reconciled. In such cases, values closest to their average and values based on testing of the most current grades of materials are selected to provide readers with information which is characteristic of currently available products, focusing on the potential use of data in solving practical problems. In this process of verification many older data were rejected unless they have been confirmed by recently conducted studies. Presentation of data for all polymers is based on a consistent pattern of data arrangement, although, depending on data availability, only data fields which contain actual values are included for each individual polymer. The entire scope of the data is divided into sections to make data comparison and search easy. .
