TITLE:

THE MAYO-LEWIS COPOLYMERIZATION MODEL (No. 150)

DATE:

Friday, April 27th, 2007

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Vadim Ponomarenko, Department of Mathematics, San Diego State University

ABSTRACT:

Plastic manufacturing is the fourth-largest manufacturing industry in the United States, employing over a million people and generating hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Typically plastics are manufactured through copolymerization, where small molecules of two types arrange themselves into long chains. Understanding this process is essential to produce plastics of desired properties. The standard model of copolymerization is the 63-year-old Mayo-Lewis model. Over 20,000 scholarly articles have appeared using it to determine desired rate constants. Unfortunately, the so-called “copolymerization equation” of this model is based on mathematically unsound assumptions. As a result, experiments have not led to consistently reproducible outcomes, and a variety of extensions and corrections have been proposed. This talk will present the Mayo-Lewis model as it is currently used (no chemistry background required), reveal its inadequacies, and propose an alternative.

HOST:

Jose Castillo

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