The synthetic fiber industry is one of the largest industries in Korea. The acrylic fiber occupies the portion of approximately 30 percent of the total synthetic fiber production by two companies, Hanil synthetic fiber co., ltd. and Taekwang ind. co., ltd. And the demands have been increasing steadily.
The objective of this project is the research and development of a novel process which would be cometitive with other processes. The process is designed on the basis of the data selected and optimized by the operation of the mini-plant designed through literature survey and laboratory experiments. And the unit train concept considered for the plant capacity is used for scale-up design and process evaluation.
The proposed process is a compact and continuous one to result in simplicity for designing and operating of the plant, and therefore an innovative and economic process.
Zinc chloride aqueous solution is used as a solvent for the polymerization of acrylonitrile and spinning system in both dope preparation and spinning solution.
The polymer is produced by isothermal continuous solution polymerization, which can be directly spun without separation of the solvent. The processing step, therfore, is simplified with omitting the processes for solidifying polymer and preparing dope solution.
And the spinning solution is controlled by the concentration of zinc chloride in coagulation bath, and fiber washing system is very easy due to high diffusivity of zinc chloride to water. Futher-more the cost of zinc chloride is low and it is domestically available and the solvent is recovered almost completely to economical in solvent cost as well as to be free from waste disposal.
The final product have the quality equal or better than existing acrylic fiber physical properties an can be made to be especially good in dyeability although dyeable fiber is not within the present scope of the project.
This project has been executed by three groups and reports consist of three volumes as follows;
. Volume A ; Solvent preparation and recovery
. Volume B ; Polymerization
. Volume C ; Fiber spinning and treating
This volume covers Polymerization.
