Developing improved models and control strategies for production of solvent-borne acrylic resins used in automotive coatings

涂料行业是一个价值超过500亿美元的全球性行业，受环境和价格压力的推动，正在经历技术的不断变化。通过高温溶液聚合生产的丙烯酸树脂是许多汽车涂料的基础聚合物组分。该行业需要有效的方法来提高生产率，用现有设备生产新的聚合物材料，并用具有低环境影响的成本效益的版本来修改或取代现有工艺。实现这些目标所需的聚合动力学和机理的基本知识是缺乏的。我们的研究通过应用专门的动力学技术来填补这一重大空白，以更好地了解这些聚合物是如何制造的，并通过实施详细的数学模型，包括重要的二级机制，控制聚合速率和聚合物结构在高温合成条件下用于生产这些材料。杜邦公司是一家领先的汽车涂料生产商，其主要工厂位于安大略的阿贾克斯，我们与杜邦公司建立了成功的合作关系，将我们的工作扩展到包括含有功能单体的共聚体系。此外，我们开始了一个新的努力，利用我们的模型，以改善半间歇式反应器系统的优化和控制。除了有利于加拿大经济中重要的汽车和涂料行业外，该研究还将提供对其他自由基聚合应用有用的基础知识，并将为两名研究生提供聚合物合成，表征和反应工程方面的专业培训。

The coatings industry is a 50+ billion dollar worldwide industry that, driven by environmental and price pressures, is undergoing a continual change in technology. Acrylic resins produced via high-temperature solution polymerization are the base polymer component for many automotive coatings. The industry requires efficient methodologies to increase production rates, to produce new polymeric materials with existing equipment, and to modify or replace existing processes with cost-effective versions that have low environmental impact. Much of the fundamental knowledge of polymerization kinetics and mechanisms required to achieve these goals is lacking. Our research is filling this significant gap through the application of specialized kinetic techniques to achieve an improved understanding of how these polymers are manufactured, and by implementing detailed mathematical models that include the important secondary mechanisms that control polymerization rate and polymer structure under high-temperature synthesis conditions used to produce these materials. Building on a successful relationship with DuPont, a leading automotive coatings producer with a major facility located in Ajax, Ontario, we extend our work to include copolymerization systems containing functional monomers. In addition, we start a new effort to utilize our models for improved optimization and control of the semibatch reactor system. In addition to benefiting the important automotive and coatings sectors in the Canadian economy, the study will provide fundamental knowledge useful to other radical polymerization applications, and will provide two graduate students with specialized training in polymer synthesis, characterization, and reaction engineering.