“…In order to monitor the manufacturing process and characterize the complex laminate structures, current techniques for polymer laminate analysis include a range of optical microscopy (Joyce et al, 1997), infrared and Raman spectroscopy (Jawhari & Pastor, 1992; Sarac & Springer, 2002; Xiao et al, 2004), thermal microprobe analysis (Price et al, 1999; Morikawa et al, 2006), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (Gilbert et al, 2013), nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (Papon et al, 2011), scanning electron microscopy (Gupper et al, 2002; Kotera et al, 2012), transmission electron microscopy (Chou et al, 2010), and atomic force microscopy (Drake et al, 1988). In most cases, when one is analyzing a multilayer polymer laminate, the first step is to microtome a thin section perpendicular to the layer thickness to expose individual layers and avoid smearing (contamination) from one layer to the next.…”