Chemical Engineering 2017 Winter Seminar Series

This talk will demonstrate how a seamless interaction between polymerization reaction engineers and catalyst chemists can enable the discovery and commercial development of a new polymer architecture. Chain shuttled blocky copolymers are manufactured using two distinct catalyst species that randomly exchange their chain segments through a catalytic chain transfer agent. The invention and development of chain shuttling was an effort that required intense cooperation and trust between reaction engineering and catalyst development disciplines. Throughout the development of chain shuttling most of the predictive work was actually carried out by catalyst development chemists using tools created for them by engineers. Various design models will be described that were first used to gauge the feasibly of the invention and later used to screen for desired catalyst behaviors. Simple continuous reactor simulation models were used to establish startup and control strategies at mini-plant and commercial scales. Monte-Carlo tools helped rationalize the dependence of polymer structure on reactor conditions, as well as provide a visual representation of the polymer backbone.