On‐line monitoring of polymer quality in a batch polymerization reactor

A novel experimental reactor system has been designed to study a variety of problems related to on‐line measurements and computer control of batch polymerization reactors. A number of measuring devices such as densitometer, viscometer, size exclusion chromatograph, and torquemeter have been put on‐line to a batch reactor and interfaced to a real time computer to monitor monomer conversion and molecular weight during polymerization. A new feature of the experimental setup is its microprocessor‐based sampling system which automatically collects samples from the reactor and injects them into the SEC analyzer. Computer software has been developed for on‐line acquisition and processing of SEC data. This work demonstrates the feasibility of on‐line measurement of monomer conversion and molecular weight. Furthermore, it presents a comparative study of some common techniques employed for off‐and on‐line measurement of polymer quality.