PhD Thesis "The mathematical modelling of the polymerisation of
dienes in a continuous stirred tank reactor"
My PhD involved modelling the reactions involved in the manufacture of
Styrene-Butadiene Rubber (SBR) that is used in the manufacture of car tyre
rubber. This involved developing a numerical integrator for stiff Ordinary
Differential Equations (ODEs) to solve the set of reaction equations. The
programme developed adapted Gear's algorithm with sophisticated control
algothms fro the step length and order used in performing the
integration.
An unusual aspect of the approach to modelling the system was the use
of Pearson Equations to calculate the moments of the chain length
distributions rather than having an equation for each chain length. This
reduced the number of equations to be integrated from several hundred to
4.
Curriculum Vitae
You can find a full CV for me here.
