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Multicomponent flash algorithm for mixtures containing polydisperse polymers
Author(s) -
Behme Stefan,
Sadowski Gabriele,
Song Yuhua,
Chen ChauChyun
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
aiche journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 167
eISSN - 1547-5905
pISSN - 0001-1541
DOI - 10.1002/aic.690490124
Subject(s) - polymer , dispersity , polypropylene , materials science , algorithm , polyethylene , flash (photography) , polymer chemistry , chemical engineering , computer science , physics , composite material , engineering , optics
Abstract An algorithm called POLYMIX is introduced for flash calculations of multicomponent systems containing polydisperse polymers. The polydispersity of polymers is taken into account through the concept of pseudocomponents. In industrial practice, a relatively high number of pseudocomponents are often required to represent multimodal polymer molecular‐weight distributions. The algorithm formulation is independent of use of specific segment‐based polymer equations of state for computing thermodynamic properties of polymer mixtures. The algorithm further offers the advantage that the computing time for polymer flash calculations is independent of the number of pseudocomponents used to represent the polydisperse polymer. Applications to polymer mixtures containing polyethylene and polypropylene are presented.