Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SB1-P090
CONTINUOUS POLYMERIZATION PROCESS AT LABORATORY
SCALE. PLANT LAYOUT AND REACTION KINETICS MONITORING
BY RAMAN SPECTROMETRY
Jose Ramiro Infante Martinez 1 , Enrique Saldívar Guerra 1 , Ricardo López González 1 , Ramón Diaz
León 1 , Luis Rodríguez Guadarrama 2
1
Centro de Investigación en Química Aplicada - CIQA , Procesos de polimerización, Mexico.
2 REPSOL, Desarrollo de Procesos, Spain.
The production process of common rubber in the industry is based on the
operation of batch reactors. In certain applications, especially in the
manufacture of high-performance tires, the rubber obtained in a batch process
has lower properties than those obtained through continuous process.
Continuous process rubbers have better processability properties due to the
coexistence of low and high molecular mass polymer chains (these shorter
chains reduce the viscosity of the melt). Processability is a fundamental property
in the tire industry. In the case of the butadiene rubbers used in the modification
of plastics, one of the stages of the manufacturing process of high impact
polystyrene requires fast solubilization of the rubber in styrene. Due to the
presence of low molecular mass in the polybutadiene molecules obtained the
continuous process, solubility time for these polymers are lower than those
observed in the batch process. This study is aimed at the development of a
continuous process for the production of rubbers of high added value as those
required to obtain high performance impact tires of low environmental impact.
The equipment array for experimentation purposes consists in its main part of
a train of two continuous stirred tank reactors operated in series. To obtain
stability conditions of the process, the design considers monitoring and control
of basic operation variables like inlet flow of reactants, temperature, level and
pressure of the reactors. These instruments are coordinated by a supervisory
control system based on hardware and software National Instruments (cDAQ
modules and LabVIEW software). The monitoring of the reaction kinetics is made
by Raman spectrometry at the end of the reaction train.
Keywords: Raman spectroscopy, polymerization reactor, in-line monitoring
Presenting authors email: ramiro.infante@ciqa.edu.mx