Developed through a partnership between Formulation Science (Core R&D at The Dow Chemical Company) and Freeslate<sup>TM</sup>, the Large Volume Semi-continuous Parallel Pressure Reactor (LVScPPR) was designed to miniaturize and automate highly complex emulsion polymerization recipes. The tool is composed of an array of four “independent” reactor modules having ~60mL working volume each. Temperature can be controlled from room temperature to 150 degrees C, pressure from 0 to 100 psig. Each reactor can be programmed independently from the others with respect to temperature control, agitation, raw materials, and reaction time. Moreover, each module is fitted with 13 addition ports, two of them being solely dedicated to a single unit. The instrument has 12 syringe pumps which are shared between all four modules. This setup enables the instrument to run complex, multi-staged emulsion polymerization processes. Design philosophy and details will be discussed along with presentation of data validating the performance with regard to reproducibility both batch-to-batch and versus more traditional lager scale methods.

Development of a fully automated small scale emulsion polymerization reactor

255th National Meeting (2018)

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