Study of the Segregated Behavior of Anionic Microfluidic Polymerization

Abstract

Summary In order to explain the reasons behind the good performance of a microfluidic reactor for anionic polymerization of a commercial polymer ‐ narrow polydispersity index, PDI, of 1.04 (unpublished results of FP7 COPIRIDE project) ‐ modeling of styrene was selected as test system. A comprehensive model accounting for the changes of all the relevant physical parameters was developed and used to compute the fluid dynamics inside the microreactor. The results show that despite the small characteristic dimension of the system an almost segregated behavior is obtained as a consequence of the reaction. This effect leads to the counterintuitive finding that, despite having a very large residence time distribution in the microreactor, polymers with very low PDIs are obtained in a quality as mentioned above.