Acrylic acid is an important raw material used in absorbent polymer process, because poly acrylic acid could act as a water absorbent. Therefore, acrylic acid and poly acrylic acid play very important roles in the industry. However, there are many acrylic acid related chemical accidents due to its corrosive properties and the nature of self-polymerization, which is an exothermic reaction.

In order to prevent acrylic acid related incidents, this project is to study how the different amount of initiator relative to acrylic acid will affect the acrylic acid polymerization process, and the effect of the existence of metal powder such as Al, Ni, Fe, and the increase of inhibitor concentration. The results show that 100% acrylic acid begin to polymerize and the gel effect occurs immediately. Acrylic acid containing Al and Ni will advance the polymerization reaction time while Fe has no significant effect on the reaction. The concentration of the inhibitor at 200ppm and 1,000ppm make no obvious difference on the reaction.

Therefore, it is suggested that iron is more suitable as the material for acrylic acid storage tank and stirring tank than Al and Ni. And due to the higher concentration of the inhibitor has no difference than the low concentration one, there is no need to use high concentration of the inhibitor.