Kinetics of vinyl acetate emulsion polymerization in a pulsed tubular reactor. Comparison between experimental and simulation results

Abstract

A new reactor, the pulsed sieve plate column (PSPC), was developed to perform continuous emulsion polymerization reactions. This reactor combines the enhanced flexibility of tubular reactors with the mixing behavior provided by sieved plates and by the introduction of pulses that is important to prevent emulsion destabilization. The main objective of this work is to study the kinetics of vinyl acetate (VA) emulsion polymerization reactions performed in this PSPC. Therefore, both experimental studies and reaction simulations were performed. Results showed that it is possible to obtain high conversions with rather low resilience times in the PSPC.