Emerging Issues in the Mechanisms of High Pressure Free Radical Ethylene Polymerization: A Review

The need to improve the performance of the high pressure polymer production process, and timely introduction of new and functionalised products even at reduced production cost which is becoming critical to staying in business has given room for overall studies of the ethylene polymerization process. In this review, emerging issues in the high pressure ethylene polymerization process through free radical approach is unveiled and presented. Different views and approaches of several authors on the tasking issues were compiled, analysed and discussed. Future researchable areas were made clear in this study. Further investigations were also made to model kinetically the high pressure ethylene polymerization reaction in tubular reactors only using mass balances and moment analysis. Although not discussed in this paper, the modeling of heterogeneous polymerization reactions such as precipitation polymerization and emulsion polymerization remains a challenge.