Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The goal of the research proposal is to produce polymer materials in dispersed media for engineering and biomaterial applications. The research plan is to investigate polymerization kinetics, develop process models and process control schemes for better design, operation and optimization of polymer reactors. Controlled Radical Polymerization (CRP) technique is a rapidly growing research area taking over conventional polymerizations. The current intensives in both academia and industry for Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization (ATRP) - important CRP variant- has been buoyed by experimental evidence proving the ATRP capability to produce tailor-made polymers. But, most ATRP studies have been done in bulk and solution media. However, open literature stresses the need to examine the process in dispersed media for practical and environment reasons. The in-house research lab is equipped with an ampule experimental setup for basic polymer reactions and a 2L reactor vessel for pilot-plant emulsion polymerizations and process development. The reactor vessel can handle polymerization systems in dispersed media for which the reaction recipe consists of chemical reagents to be dispersed in aqueous phase. In the short-term, the research activity will focus on conducting fundamental kinetics study of ATRP systems of few monomers, taken separately or combined, in dispersed medium. The collected data will be explored to elucidate chemical kinetics properties of the end-product and to validate process models. Sample analysis using special instruments will be done to determine the reaction extent, molecular weight distribution (MWD), particle size distribution (PSD) and detect polymer structure including chain branching. Secondly, emulsion heterogeneous polymerization systems are known for having comparatively low viscosity, good heat transfer and low environmental impact. Indisputably, there is a need for reliable mechanistic models to elucidate further the current understanding of the ATRP physico-chemical phenomena and examine the polymer reactor behavior under stirring in dispersed media. Mechanistic kinetic models arise from the conservation laws of Physics. Hence, the study requires the development of mathematical models for process simulation and optimization of the reactor vessel handling ATRP emulsion polymerization. Besides, dynamic models are utilized to design model-based control schemes with an optimiser that can account for process constraints and to address the issue of unavailable online measurements of process variables such as polymer molecular weights. It is expected that the outcome of this research proposal will provide sound guidelines to design successful ATRP processes for making new types of structured polymers for engineering and biomaterial applications. In overall, the research program is to promote, even further, the polymer reaction research at Ryerson and train highly qualified personnel for Canadian academia and industry.