Case Study - Free Radical Solution Polymerization for Polymer Manufacture
The R&D group of an international inkjet supplier developed a new range of products in-house but had no polymer manufacturing facility. They looked to Witton as their contract manufacturing partner to scale up and manufacture these materials.
Scale up has involved :-
- Initial work in the solvent selected by the customer demonstrated that due to the long processing time required this would not give the price that was required by the business unit to successfully launch the product.
- Identifying an alternative solvent provided a route to manufacture the correct product at the right price.
Subsequently the customer discovered a potential issue with the byproducts of the initiator they choose for the reaction:-
- To overcome this issue a distillation step has been added to the process to remove the initiator byproducts.
- This requires the use of a second larger vessel.
- Analytical testing was developed to demonstrate the removal of the troublesome by-products.
