EXPERIMENTAL AND SIMULATION STUDY OF GRAFTING OF GELATIN ON PMMA IN EMULSION REACTOR

Abstract

Production of polymers in the emulsion reactor is advantageous to that of bulk reactor specifically for better control and yield. The free-radical polymerizations are often associated with the gel effect and usually these are polymerized in an emulsion reactor. These reactors are used for both hornoas well as co-polymerizations. Usually, the copolymers are used for augmenting the properties. One of such copolymer is gelatin grafted PMMA which is used in biomedical, electronics, architectural and automobile applications. The present study focuses on modelling of gelatin grafted poiymethyl- methacrylate (PMMA) polymerization in emulsion reactor. Firstly, a kinetic model is developed for polymerization comprises of several reactions. The material balance for these leads to thirteen differential equations of initial value type. These model equations correspond to highly stiff differential equations and are solved using the GEARS algorithm. The kinetic parameters are tuned using the experimental data present in the literature. The tuned model is further used for multi-objective optimization using evolutionary algorithms. The objectives of the study are to maximize the araftina and minimizina the batch time. The results show considerable improvement in the performance of the reactor.