High-gravity as a research tool in studying the nature of structure formation in polymers Original Research Article

This paper is concerned with the use of high-gravity as a means of enhancing and studying mechanism of gel formation which are weak in normal and microgravity conditions or exist under the disguise of free convection. The experimental set up specifically designed for this purpose allowed us to visualize the fields of the monomer conversion and the reaction mixture flows during gel synthesis on a centrifuge. The obtained data have been used to assess the role of the detected gravitational mechanisms and to determine the character of their interaction for different ways of reaction initiation.