Modeling and Simulation of an Isothermal Suspension Polymerization Reactor for PMMA Production Using Python

Abstract

This paper presents the modeling and simulation of a suspension polymerization for methyl methacrylate in an isothermal reactor to produce poly methyl methacrylate using Python 3.5. The numeral solution to the stiff ordinary differential equations was performed by building a custom module which was used with the inbuilt NumPy and matplotlib modules that come with the Anaconda python distro. Python was used in order to obtain a realistic solution that considers the gel, glass and cage effects that affect the non-linear polymerization kinetics established in literature. The results showed that a maximum monomer conversion of about 92.8% at a minimum batch time of about 2.2 hours could be achieved at the specified conditions to obtain a polydisperse polymer with an index of 27. It is further concluded that Python can be employed to perform similar studies with equal success as any other programming language.