Modeling and experimental studies of emulsion copolymerization systems. I.Experimental results

A systematic experimental and modeling study of several emulsion copolymeri zation systems has been performed, and will be reported in a series of pape rs. Ten binary and three ternary copolymerizations involving styrene, methy l methacrylate, butyl acrylate, butadiene, vinyl acetate, acrylic acid, and ethylene were studied varying polymerization temperature, monomer composit ion, water to monomer ratio, initiator and emulsifier concentrations. Conve rsion, particle size, copolymer composition, and gel content were measured at several reaction times. The goal of this series of papers is to assess o ur quantitative understanding of emulsion copolymerization expressed in the form of a comprehensive mathematical model applied to monomers widely used in industry. In this first paper of the series, a global comparison of the experimental results is made. It is observed that the gel content is highe r in systems containing butyl acrylate and butadiene, and smaller in system s containing methyl methacrylate. Larger particle numbers are obtained for lattices containing acrylic acid and butadiene. It is also shown that, for most of the systems, integration of the simple Mayo-Lewis equation is adequ ate to explain the drift in copolymer composition observed experimentally. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.