Kinetic Modeling and Reactor Simulation and Optimization of Industrially Important Polymerization Processes: a Perspective

The field of what is now referred to as polymer reaction engineering started in the early 1930s with Staudinger’s discovery of macromolecules. Though the earlier work was related primarily to synthesis and kinetics, the field started growing at increasing rates, possibly in the late 1950s or early 1960s. In the early years, this field provided a challenging area of research. It has evolved from the modeling of simple polymerizations to that of more complex systems, to experimentation for filling the gaps in our knowledge, to optimization. This mini-review summarizes a small sampling of the literature in polymerization reaction engineering over the last about four decades using a personal perspective. The concepts in this area are now being applied in a variety of specialized domains, e.g., polymerization at the nano scale, design and control of chain macrostructure and rapid optimal switch-over of grades being manufactured, molecular simulation and computational fluid dynamics, etc.