The present work addresses the modeling and simulation of the addition of copolymerizations of styrene and methyl methacrylate
in batch mode, and the formation of tailored vinyl acetate/acrylic acid copolymers is evaluated through stochastic optimization
procedures based on the Monte Carlo method. A kinetic model of the free-radical reaction was proposed in order to predict the
behavior of the reaction system taking into consideration the presence of the penultimate unit effect. The profiles of conversion
and copolymer composition were also evaluated considering the effect of the medium viscosity (kinetic phenomena related to
gel and glass effects) on the reaction performance. It was shown that the proposed model for chain-growth copolymerization is
able to describe strong nonlinear behaviors such as autoacceleration of the polymerization and drift of copolymer composition.
It was also shown that copolymers with homogeneous composition can be successfully synthesized through manipulation of the
monomer feed flow rate based on a stochastic optimization procedure
