Open Access

Uwe Budde, Michael Wulkow

• Modeling of free radical polymerization leads to very large and usually stiff systems of ordinary differential equations which cannot be solved directly in an efficient way. This paper presents the application of a new approach called discrete Galerkin method to a realistic example - the polymerization of methyl methacrylate(MMA). The method is characterized by a Galerkin approximation on the basis of orthogonal polynomials of a discrete variable which represents the polymer degree. It allows the efficient computation of solutions of complete kinetic schemes with time- or moment-dependent reaction coefficients by reducing the complexity to a few differential equations. The approximation error can be controlled by an error estimation. In the case of MMA polymerization a reduction of computational effort by a factor of about 25 compared to a standard method can be obtained for the quasi-steady-state approximation of the model. In addition solutions of the instationary kinetic scheme can be easily computed.