Particles Formation in Polymer-Water-Surfactant Systems

Our customer, an international chemical company dealing with chemical, advanced materials, AgroSciences and plastics businesses and delivering a broad range of technology-based products and solutions, set such challenges for this project:

• Create a prediction model for polymer particles size
• Determine rheological properties of water with surfactant addition
• Find out why more water means larger particles.

During the research, we used the following approaches: Micro model (one unit polymer particle) and Macro model (flow of polymer in the shear field). Small (microns) solid polymer particles were dispersed in the water.

The final product obtained due to the conducted research has the following advantages:

• Storage and transportation ways are improved
• New materials can be obtained

Experiments’ results:

1. We developed two simple models which estimate the size of polymer particles. Both of them have a good correlation with literature data.

2. We developed a model giving one of the possible reasons why particles grow when more water is injected in the first step of the process.

3. We reported an overview on the basics of emulsions and emulsification, stability of emulsions, phase inversion and particle formation.