MODELING PARTICLE SIZE DISTRIBUTION IN HETEROGENEOUS POLYMERIZATION SYSTEMS USING MULTIMODAL LOGNORMAL FUNCTION

• Autor(a) principal: Ferrari,J. C.
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Castilhos,F., Araújo,P. H. H., Sayer,C.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Brazilian Journal of Chemical Engineering
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-66322016000300469
• topic: Particle Size Distribution; Lognormal function; Parameter estimation; Particle Swarm Optimization; Heterogeneous polymerization

Abstract This work evaluates the usage of the multimodal lognormal function to describe Particle Size Distributions (PSD) of emulsion and suspension polymerization processes, including continuous reactions with particle re-nucleation leading to complex multimodal PSDs. A global optimization algorithm, namely Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), was used for parameter estimation of the proposed model, minimizing the objective function defined by the mean squared errors. Statistical evaluation of the results indicated that the multimodal lognormal function could describe distinctive features of different types of PSDs with accuracy and consistency.