Currently, approximately 200, billion pounds of synthesis polymeric materials are produced per year throughout the world. These materials are made through numerous chemical mechanisms, in a wide variety of reactor configurations. The benefits of improved operation in such a large market are obvious. In addition, the current trend towards specialty chemicals is impacting the polymer field as manufacturers move towards high value-added specialty polymers with unique properties aimed at very specific markets. This sort of business, while profitable, requires tight control of polymer properties to meet highly specific end-use applications. Such tight control may be obtained through a combination of understanding of the chemistry and physics of the polymerization process, optimization of the polymerization reactor configuration and operation, and monitoring and digital control of the polymerization. Polymerization reactions are especially benefitted by optimization and control since polymers are in general "products by process". That is to say that the history of the polymerization is written in the molecular weight distribution, the degree of branching, and the copolymer composition and sequence distributions. The end-use properties, in turn, are determined by the molecular structure of the polymer. The manipulation of the molecular structure of the polymer during polymerization can be described as polymerization reaction engineering, and involves chemical kinetics, mathematical modeling, reactor design, optimization, measurement, and process control.
Research in polymerization engineering attempts to take an engineering approach to the design and operation of polymerization reactors. This includes studies in polymerization kinetics, reactor dynamics (stability, multiplicity, chaos), reactor configurations (batch, semibatch or continuous; CSTR versus PFR), and reactor optimization. These studies are carried out in bulk, solution, suspension, and emulsion polymerization of a variety of monomers. Especial emphasis has been placed on heterogenous systems, including emulsion, dispersion and miniemulsion polymerization.
Specific projects have included continuous reactors for fundamental kinetic studies in emulsion polymerization, modeling of emulsion polymerization with nonionic surfactants, emulsion copolymerization with water-soluble comonomers, miniemulsion copolymerization, and mathematical modeling and computer control of polymerization reactors.