Event
ChBE Seminar Series: Kyu Yong Choi
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Room 2110 Chemical & Nuclear Engineering Bldg.
Professor Nam Sun Wang
(301) 405-1910
nsw@umd.edu
Polymer Reaction Engineering in Molecular and Nano Scales
Presented by Kyu Yong Choi
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
University of Maryland
Polymer reaction engineering (PRE) is a discipline to study chemical, physical, and process aspects of polymerization relevant to industrial polymer manufacturing. One of the interesting features of PRE is that it deals with multi-scale problems from molecular-scale to plant scale, which pose unique scientific and engineering challenges. In this presentation, our new and recent research approaches in polymer reaction engineering are illustrated with examples. The first example is the catalytic polymerization of olefins and styrene in silica-coated nanotube reactor (SNTR) arrays developed in our laboratory. The second example is the dispersive suspension polymerization of methyl methacrylate to produce multihollow polymer particles, porous particles, and unusual morphological structures. The detailed kinetic modeling of ethylene-cycloolefin copolymerization process is also illustrated.
