ACOMP/CI has progressed to the point where molar mass and composition can be automatically controlled during free radical copolymerization reactions. The topics covered will be:
i) Automatic, simultaneous control of molar mass and composition in free radical copolymerization. The original strategy used to control only molar mass involved the use of two proportionality parameters, aA and p, without any detailed kinetic models. aA is monomer A conversion rate and p the link between instantaneous weight average molar mass Mw,inst and monomer concentration. aA and p can be re-measured during a reaction as frequently as needed and are used to control monomer feed from a reservoir into the reactor.
Extending the method to simultaneous control of molar mass and composition requires only one additional, measurable proportionality parameter, the conversion rate of monomer B, aB. Figure 1 shows production of a copolymer with trimodal composition and constant Mw. The comonomers were Acrylamide and Styrene Sulfonate (SS). FSS is the instantaneous fraction of SS incorporated into chains.
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