Hydrophilic (co)polymers carrying a thiocarbonyl thio end group such as poly(dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate), poly(ethylene oxide), and poly(ethylene oxide)‐block‐poly(dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate) have been evaluated as precursors of stabilizers in batch ab initio emulsion polymerization of styrene under acidic conditions to form electrosterically stabilized polystyrene latex particles. As a mixture of P(DMAEMA/H+Cl−)‐RAFT and PEO‐RAFT failed to give satisfactory results, PEO‐RAFT was used as a control agent for the RAFT polymerization of DMAEMA, and the resulting block copolymer was successfully used in ab initio styrene emulsion polymerization.magnified image

A computational framework, consisting of a turbulent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation coupled to a multi-zonal population balance is used to efficiently simulate the scaleup of a semi-batch emulsion polymerization, specifically one where the mixing issues are confined over a short period of time. Fluent TM CFD software is used to generate flow fields inside a series of reactors of varying production scale; these flow fields are subsequently used to generate a multi-zonal grid. The effects of reactor scale and inhomogeneous mixing on the latex particle size distribution are simulated by running a detailed emulsion polymerization model on the multi-zonal grid. In this paper, the second of two parts, the capabilities of the framework are demonstrated by simulating the scale-up of a semi-batch styrene emulsion polymerization.