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

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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.