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Continuous Tanks‐in‐Series Process for Free‐Radical Polymerization with Long‐Chain Branching and Scission: Effect of the Order of a Large Tank
Author(s) -
Tobita Hidetaka
Publication year - 2015
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.201500031
Subject(s) - branching (polymer chemistry) , gyration , bond cleavage , polymerization , polymer , polymer chemistry , radius of gyration , radical polymerization , molar mass distribution , degree of polymerization , chain transfer , continuous stirred tank reactor , chemistry , materials science , thermodynamics , mathematics , organic chemistry , physics , catalysis , geometry
Tanks‐in‐series model for free‐radical polymerization that involves the polymer transfer reactions, leading to both long‐chain branching and scission, is extended to account for differentξ i ≡ k p , i[ R • ] it ¯ ifor each tank, where the subscript i represents each value for the i th tank. Illustrative calculations are conducted for the cases with one large ξ n for the n th tank and the same ξ i for all i 's with i ≠ n . The effect of the order of a large ξ n was investigated, by keeping the final conversion x N , average branch densityρ ¯ N, and scission densityη ¯ Nthe same, to find that the largest weight‐average degree of polymerization,P ¯ wis obtained for n = 1. The full distributions of MW, the branching density, and the radii of gyration are also investigated to propose a novel reactor design strategy for the tower‐type multi‐zone reactors.