Scale‐Up of Emulsion Polymerization Reactors Part I – Development of a Model Framework

Abstract

A computational framework, consisting of a turbulent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation coupled to a multi‐zonal population balance is used to efficiently simulate the scale‐up of a semi‐batch emulsion polymerization, specifically one where the mixing issues are confined over a short period of time. Fluent CFD software is used to generate flow fields inside a series of reactors of varying production scale; these flow fields are subsequently used to generate a multi‐zonal grid. The effects of reactor scale and inhomogeneous mixing on the latex particle size distribution are simulated by running a detailed emulsion polymerization model on the multi‐zonal grid. In this paper, the first of two parts, the interplay between the CFD simulation and the automatic zoning algorithm is presented in depth.