Product quality consistency is the major challenge faced by Process Research and Development groups in chemical industries. Recently the approach of process intensification has attracted more and more attention. It offers many attractive features, not least dramatically reduced capital investment required for commercial-scale operation, but also easier scaling out rather than scaling up, which has the potential for reduced lead times to commercialization of processes. Many approaches have been made to intensifying processes, and one is continuous processing, where there is an additional benefit of offering better control of product quality.

Recently, the spinning disk reactor (SDR) was brought forward as an alternative to traditional stirred tank processing technology, claiming to offer distinct advantages with respect to mixing characteristics, heat transfer, and residence time distribution, through creating a more intense fluid dynamic environment. Compared with classical stirred tank reactors, significant enhancements in polymerization rate have been obtained using SDR for a wide range of homogenous phase polymerization reactions that involve condensation, free radical and ionic mechanisms. And the continuous production of nano- and micro-size particles via reactive crystallization using SDR was also reported. There are also reports predicting a thousand-fold reduction in reaction, hundred-fold reduction inventory, and a 93% reduction in impurity level by using SDR for a process.

However, no studies have been reported that using SDR in heterogeneous-phase polymerization and no disclosed process involved using multiple SDRs.

In this paper, a method to produce submicron sized polymer particles with tunable particle composition and particle morphology using continuous SDR (single or multiple stages) for heterogeneous-phase polymerization (copolymerization) (i.e. emulsion, dispersion, and miniemulsion, microemulsion polymerization, etc.) will be discussed.