Deterministic Modeling of CopolymerMicrostructure: Composition Drift andSequence Patterns

摘要

A concept of a population balance is applied to study evolving structures of propagating linear copolymer chains. As a result, a general numerical toolbox was developed capable to handle various copolymerization mechanisms utilizing two-dimensional distributions as means of system description. The method was applied to free radical copolymerization of styrene–acrylonitrile explaining peculiar bimodality in chain length distribution observed for asymmetrical initial monomer ratios.