Modeling and simulation for acrylamide polymerization of super absorbent polymer

In view of the scale up of a batch reactor for super absorbent polymer (SAP), a dynamic mathematical model of a commercial scale batch reactor was developed with mass balance, energy balance, and complex polymerization kinetics. The kinetic parameters of the polymerization were estimated on the basis of the established mathematical model and reference data. Simulation results were validated with less than 10% marginal error compared with reference data. A case study was executed in terms of dynamic simulation for eight different initial concentrations of initiator and monomer to analyze the influence of initial concentration and predict the operation condition for desired product. The results were compared with various reference data, and good agreement was achieved. From the results, we argue that the methodology and results from this study can be used for the scale up of a polymerization batch reactor from the early stage of design.