Presidential Young Investigator Award: Kinetics of Phase Transfer Catalyzed Free Radical Polymerization

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This research is in three areas: (1) design and control of condensation polymerization processes, (2) kinetics of phase transfer catalyzed free radical polymerization, and (3) computer-aided design, analysis, and control of industrial polymerization processes. Under (1) above, the approach is to develop detailed mathematical models for the multi-stage polymerization processes and to carry out extensive experimentation to extract unknown kinetic parameters and to confirm model predictions of reactor dynamics. Under (2), the goal is to elucidate the kinetics of phase transfer polymerization (PTC), above, stochastic state estimation techniques and adaptive control schemes will be applied to estimate unmeasured parameters such as degree of conversion, copolymer composition, chain sequence length distribution, etc. Analysis of both steady state and dynamic behavior will be done because many exothermic polymerization reactors exhibit peculiarities such as steady state multiplicity, sustained oscillation, runaway, etc.