In today's global market, the demand is for high-volume, export-quality urea that is both environmentally responsible and produced with maximum efficiency. Stamicarbon’s proven fluid-bed granulation technology is engineered to meet this challenge head-on.
Granulation is the premier finishing method for export and bulk storage, delivering a product with superior crushing strength, a low caking tendency, and minimal dust. Our technology builds on this foundation to create a superior granule that complies with all international quality standards while optimizing your plant's performance and profitability.
Key Advantages of Stamicarbon's Technology
The key to our technology success is the minimum amount of formaldehyde used, allowing for substantial savings.
Thanks to the film-spraying nozzles our design has the world’s lowest dust production, ensuring less fouling and long production times between the cleaning cycles. In other words: less down-time required for clean- ups, high on-stream time (more than 150 days).
Furthermore, thanks to our unique proprietary scrubbing design, this urea granulation solution meets the lowest plant emissions available on the market.
How Does a Granulation Design Work?
The heart of the granulation is the fluid- bed granulator. Here, urea melt with a urea concentration of 98.5 wt.% is introduced via multiple spray nozzles and deposited on the seed particles/granules in the fluid bed.
The Stamicarbon nozzles ensure that the urea melt is sprayed in the form of a film, which has the benefit that only 0.3 wt.% or less of formaldehyde needs to be dosed to the urea melt.
A continuous stream of secondary air is introduced via a ring in each spray nozzle and takes care of the transport of the seeds/granules through the urea melt-film.
The fluid-bed granulator is divided into multiple granulation sections in which urea melt is introduced via nozzles and cooling sections in which the formed granules are cooled down, for further processing.
As the granules move through the granulation section, their size steadily increases by layering until they reach the required granule diameter. Fluidization air is distributed over the granulation sections and cooling sections.
The granules leaving the granulator pass a safety screen (to remove lumps/agglomerates) and are transported by a bucket elevator to the main screens, where they are separated into three fractions.
The in-spec product is cooled and transported to storage. After cooling and crushing, the coarse product, together with the fines from the main screens, is sent back to the granulator as seed material for granulation.
The fluidization and secondary air are exhausted from the granulator and sent to a dust/ammonia scrubber.
