Mathematical Modeling of Nitroxide Mediated Copolymerization in Tubular Reactors. Prediction of the Bivariate Molecular Weight Distribution

ASTEASUAIN, MARIANO; SARMORIA, CLAUDIA; BRANDOLIN, ADRIANA

Costa Rica

Congreso; XII Simposio Latinoamericano de Polímeros (SLAP 2010) / X Congreso Iberoamericano de Polímeros (CIP 2010); 2010

Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica

Controlled/Living radical polymerization (CRP) shows great potential for industrial applications because it combines advantages of conventional free radical and living polymerizations. It can be used in heterogeneous emulsion, suspension or dispersion polymerizations, and offers a great versatility for the synthesis of copolymers. Its use in the preparation of block, gradient and graft copolymers has been reported. CRP in tubular reactors offers the possibility of preparing copolymers with tailor-made molecular structure in a continuous process. The use of lateral feeds and the manipulation of partial conversion at the lateral feeding points makes it possible to control the copolymer block lengths in each reactor section. One of the variants of CRP is the nitroxide mediated polymerization (NMP). In previous works we presented a steady state model of the nitroxide mediated copolymerization in tubular reactors that was able to predict the sequence length distribution, average compositions, average molecular weights, monomer conversion and the MWD with respect to the total copolymer chain length, as function of the reactor axial distance. In this work we present an extension of that model, which consists in the incorporation of the prediction of the bivariate copolymer MWD, that is, the MWD with respect to the amount of each comonomer in the chain.