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Scale‐ U p of Emulsion Polymerization Reactors Part I – Development of a Model Framework
Author(s) -
Pohn Jordan,
Cunningham Michael,
McKenna Timothy F. L.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
macromolecular reaction engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.37
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1862-8338
pISSN - 1862-832X
DOI - 10.1002/mren.201300010
Subject(s) - computational fluid dynamics , emulsion polymerization , mixing (physics) , turbulence , scale (ratio) , grid , fluent , mechanics , flow (mathematics) , emulsion , materials science , polymerization , physics , chemical engineering , engineering , mathematics , polymer , geometry , quantum mechanics , composite material
A computational framework, consisting of a turbulent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation coupled to a multi‐zonal population balance is used to efficiently simulate the scale‐up of a semi‐batch emulsion polymerization, specifically one where the mixing issues are confined over a short period of time. Fluent CFD software is used to generate flow fields inside a series of reactors of varying production scale; these flow fields are subsequently used to generate a multi‐zonal grid. The effects of reactor scale and inhomogeneous mixing on the latex particle size distribution are simulated by running a detailed emulsion polymerization model on the multi‐zonal grid. In this paper, the first of two parts, the interplay between the CFD simulation and the automatic zoning algorithm is presented in depth.