TITLE:
Modeling and Simulation of an Isothermal Suspension Polymerization Reactor for PMMA Production Using Python
AUTHORS:
Aldo Okullo, Noah Tibasiima, Joshua Barasa
KEYWORDS:
Suspension Polymerization, Modeling, Simulation, Python
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Chemical Engineering and Science,
Vol.7 No.4,
October
17,
2017
ABSTRACT: This paper presents the modeling and simulation of a suspension polymerization
for methyl methacrylate in an isothermal reactor to produce poly methyl
methacrylate using Python 3.5. The numeral solution to the stiff ordinary differential
equations was performed by building a custom module which was
used with the inbuilt NumPy and matplotlib modules that come with the
Anaconda python distro. Python was used in order to obtain a realistic solution
that considers the gel, glass and cage effects that affect the non-linear polymerization
kinetics established in literature. The results showed that a
maximum monomer conversion of about 92.8% at a minimum batch time of
about 2.2 hours could be achieved at the specified conditions to obtain a polydisperse
polymer with an index of 27. It is further concluded that Python can
be employed to perform similar studies with equal success as any other programming
language.