MINIMUM-TIME STRATEGY TO PRODUCE NONUNIFORM EMULSION COPOLYMERS .2. OPEN-LOOP CONTROL

An iterative approach was developed to determine the optimal monomer a ddition policies in real emulsion copolymerization systems in which on ly limited kinetic information is available. The approach was applied to obtain widely different copolymer composition profiles for the emul sion copolymerization of butyl acrylate and styrene. The approach invo lves a series of semicontinuous emulsion copolymerizations carried out in an open-loop control mode. Each reaction was used to obtain an est imation of the kinetics of the process that was used to calculate the monomer addition profiles for the next experiment. The method is model -independent and converges rapidly. (C) 1995 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.