Continuous flow reactor methacrylate

In this short initial communication we wish to describe a general purpose continuous-flow stirred-tank reactor (CSTR) system which incorporates a digital computer for supervisory control purposes and which has been constructed for use with radical and other polymerization processes. The performance of the system has been tested by attempting to control the MWD of the product from free-radically initiated solution polymerizations of methyl methacrylate (MMA) using oscillatory feed-forward control strategies for the reagent feeds. This reaction has been selected for study because of the ease of experimentation which it affords and because the theoretical aspects of the control of MWD in radical polymerizations has attracted much attention in the scientific literature. 

The reaction of propionic acid and HCHO was carried out with a continuous-flow system. The reactor was made of a steel tube (50 cm X 1.8 cm I.D.) mounted vertically and immersed in a lead bath. Nitrogen was fed in from the top of the reactor at a fixed rate of 140 ml/min (at 20°C) as the carrier or the diluent, and a mixture of trioxane [(HCHO) ] and propionic acid was introduced into the preheating section of the reactor by means of an injection syringe pump. The feed rates of propionic acid, HCHO, and nitrogen were 33.6, 16.8, and 350 mmol/h, respectively. The other procedures were the same as those described previously [3,4,9]. The yield (mol-%) was defined as 100 times (moles of methacrylic acid)/(moles of HCHO fed). 

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