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

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.