This award supports cooperative reseach between Willam Conner of the University of Massachusetts and Mario Chiovetta of the Institute of Technology Development for the Chemical Industry in Santa Fe, Argentina (INTEC). This research involves a coordinated program of olefin polymerization catalysis research and sorption in zeolites to be conducted between the University of Massachusetts and INTEC in Argentina. The focus of the work is to experimentally determine the changes in catalyst morphology and to quantify the changes in the thermal and mass transport that occur during the polymerization process and sorption within zeolites. These experimentally measured parameters will be used as the basis for representing the processes and calculating the dependence of the polymer production and of zeolite sorption on the process conditions and the changing catalyst morphology. The cooperative program will involve both exchanges of graduate (postdoctoral) research assistants and visits between principal investigators. The experimental program and extended characterization will primarily be conducted at the University of Massachusetts where the reactor systems and instruments for system characterization are available. Specific analyses are also to be conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratories (for the tomography) and the University of Paris. Parallel polymer- ization reaction studies will be conducted at INTEC in Argentina for a stirred bed polymerization system with morphological analyses to be primarily conducted at the University of Massachusetts. INTEC will be the main center of the modelling and simulation studies for this collaborative research. They will continue their pioneering modelling studies of polymerization and develop the parallel analyses of zeolitic systems.
