Engineering Commons^™

Microreactor System With Immobilized Enzyme On Polydimethylsiloxane (Pdms) Polymers, Zonghuan Lu

Doctoral Dissertations

Microsystems, specifically microreactors, open the gate to new, improved analytical techniques while offering many advantages for a large number of applications in chemical engineering, pharmacy, medicine, and biotechnology. This study explored the feasibility of fabrication of microreactors using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as a support for enzyme immobilization. Urease enzyme was used for catalyzing the conversion of urea to ammonia.

PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) is a silicone-based elastomeric polymer. Traditional micromanufacturing technology was employed for reactor mold fabrication. The mold was fabricated based on photolithography techniques, and SU-8 photoresist was used to construct reactor structure templates. The resulting silicon-wafer based reactor molds were then …

Reaction Control In Quiescent Systems Of Free-Radical Retrograde-Precipitation Polymerization, Vijaya Raghavan Tirumala

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Free-radical retrograde-precipitation polymerization, FRRPP in short, is a novel polymerization process discovered by Dr. Gerard Caneba in the late 1980s. The current study is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the reaction mechanism of the FRRPP and its thermodynamically-driven features that are predominant in controlling the chain reaction.

A previously developed mathematical model to represent free radical polymerization kinetics was used to simulate a classic bulk polymerization system from the literature. Unlike other existing models, such a sparse-matrix-based representation allows one to explicitly accommodate the chain length dependent kinetic parameters.

Extrapolating from the past results, mixing was experimentally shown …