Transient behavior and gelation of free radical polymerizations in continuous stirred tank reactors

Using the authors' previously developed method for the general kinetic analysis of non-linear irreversible polymerizations, the simulation of free radical homogeneous polymerization systems with terminal branching and chain transfer to polymer has been carried out for continuous stirred tank reactions. Its improved accuracy on the numerical evaluation of generating functions has been exploited in order to perfrom their numerical inversion and chain length distributions could also be estimated with or without the presence of gel. A comparison with alternative techniques emphasizing the effect of their simplifying assumptions on the accuracy of calculations is also present.