MATHEMATICAL MODELLING OF GRANULATION PROCESS IN FLUIDISED BED

Abstract

One of the most common methods of making mineral fertilizers is granulation. Fluidized bed granulation is a complex interaction process influenced by a large number of factors: operating variables, material properties, and equipment parameters. Any slight change in these factors can lead to a significant deterioration of the final pellet quality and lead to energy and material waste, so creating a control strategy to improve the final pellet quality is essential. Fertilizers in the form of granules have a number of advantages over conventional fertilizers in the form of powder or liquid, namely, ease of transportation, well absorbed and less susceptible to weathering from the soil, convenient to use. To obtain solid particles from liquid starting material such as solutions, emulsions or suspensions, the following processes are used: crystallization, granulation, spray drying. Depending on the focus of the study, the fluidized bed granulation process can be modeled at different levels of abstraction. The dynamics of individual particles is modeled on a microscopic scale. The interaction of a particle with a liquid, equipment or other particles is considered. The next rougher level of abstraction is the mesoscale. Here the particles are divided into classes according to their characteristics. It is assumed that the particles of the class have the same properties and dynamics. On a macroscopic scale, the roughest level of approximation, attention is focused on the integral behavior of the whole set of particles. As a result, the selected characteristic values describe the state of the particle layer. There are different approaches to modeling for each scale. It is proposed to describe the microscopic scale using the hydrodynamics model, the mesoscale using the balance model, and the macroscopic scale using the moments method or the Lagrange-Euler model. A combined balancehydrodynamics model and a multi-chamber balance model that can be used for the tasks of building information technology for fluidized bed granulation process control technology are also considered.