Polymeric particles less than 100 nm in size (polymer nanoparticles), which are useful in the fields of medicine and so on, are synthesized through emulsion polymerization, wherein surfactants are essential for maintaining their dispersion stability, contaminating particle surfaces and causing high environmental pollution. The soap‐free emulsion polymerization (SFEP) of styrene in a packed reactor using microglass beads enables the synthesis of polymer nanoparticles without surfactants. Ultraviolet irradiation is used for radical polymerization using an initiator during the SFEP of styrene. The reaction space in the packed reactor is controlled by the size of glass beads to be filled in the reactor. A decrease in the size of the glass beads narrows the reaction space, causing the average polystyrene particle size to reach 27.3 nm and suppress convection flow by the wall of the glass beads, thereby limiting particle motion and preventing particle growth through particle collisions.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
{"title":"Environmentally Friendly Synthesis of Polymer Nanoparticles in a Packed Reactor Using Glass Beads","authors":"Tetsuya Yamamoto, Ayumi Morino, Hideki Kanda, Ayumu Seki, Toru Ishigami","doi":"10.1002/mren.202400009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/mren.202400009","url":null,"abstract":"Polymeric particles less than 100 nm in size (polymer nanoparticles), which are useful in the fields of medicine and so on, are synthesized through emulsion polymerization, wherein surfactants are essential for maintaining their dispersion stability, contaminating particle surfaces and causing high environmental pollution. The soap‐free emulsion polymerization (SFEP) of styrene in a packed reactor using microglass beads enables the synthesis of polymer nanoparticles without surfactants. Ultraviolet irradiation is used for radical polymerization using an initiator during the SFEP of styrene. The reaction space in the packed reactor is controlled by the size of glass beads to be filled in the reactor. A decrease in the size of the glass beads narrows the reaction space, causing the average polystyrene particle size to reach 27.3 nm and suppress convection flow by the wall of the glass beads, thereby limiting particle motion and preventing particle growth through particle collisions.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved","PeriodicalId":18052,"journal":{"name":"Macromolecular Reaction Engineering","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140941337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Front Cover: Polymer reaction engineering (PRE) is a key competence for process scale-up, but the information collected in daily plant operation is not fully exploited. What do catalytic olefin polymerization plants tell us? In article 2300046, by Vasileios Touloupidis and João B. P. Soares, a method to increase catalyst and process know-how, based on experimentally acquired results from a continuous tandem reactor polymerization process is proposed and validated using small-scale experiments.