suspension polymerization processes are significantly important in polymer bead formation. one of the important factors for bead size control in these processes is variation in surface tension. in this research, the prediction of optimum concentration of a surface active agent was investigated on the basis of the experimental surface tension diagrams. the experimental data show that the desired...

Suspension polymerization process is commonly used to produce expandable polystyrene. In the conventional method for producing this polymer, two different initiators are added to the process at two different temperature levels. In the industrial scale, this process is time consuming and difficult to control. A new method (Multi-Stage Initiator Dosing, MID) is proposed, in which, the initiator i...

Front Cover: In article number 2100222 by Rachel C. Steinhardt and co-workers, a soft actuation system is described, based on new core-shell thermally-expandable microparticle, made of isobutane core polystyrene shell, linked to photothermal nano-transducer, gold nanoparticles, resulting in core-shell-shell nanohybrid. The particles expand thermal milieus, are able power the movement composite ...

Self-organizing maps (SOM) have been successfully applied in many fields of research. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of SOM-based method for the analysis of Expandable PolyStyrene (EPS) batch process. To this end, a data set of EPS-batch process was used for training a SOM. Reference vectors of the SOM were then classified by K-means algorithm into six clusters, which represent product t...