INVESTIGADORES
COTABARREN Ivana Maria
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
UREA GRANULATION CIRCUIT SIMULATOR: DESIGN, SIMULATION, OPTIMIZATION AND CONTROL OF UFT GRANULATION PLANTS
Autor/es:
COTABARREN, IVANA; BERTIN, DIEGO; BUCALÁ, VERÓNICA; PIÑA, JULIANA
Lugar:
Londres
Reunión:
Exposicin; APM Forum 2017; 2017
Institución organizadora:
Process System Enterprise
Resumen:
Granular urea is the most-consumed nitrogen-based fertilizer, being critical in the modern agriculture scenario. Industrial urea granulation is mainly performed in fluidized-bed granulators combined with coolers, crushers and screens to constitute granulation circuits. Unfortunately, this process is usually operated by trial and error. Typical dynamic operational problems are undesired plant shutdowns due to the formation of lumps in the granulator and continuous oscillations of product quality due to the cycling nature of the granulation circuits or changes of the desired product granulometry to meet particular market demands. In this context, it becomes critical the design and control of granulation circuits under an integrated approach.In this work, a simulator for the UFT fluidized-bed granulation technology is presented, which consists of ad-hoc models for the units involved (multichamber granulator, fluidized-bed cooler, double-deck screens and double-roll crushers). These models were integrated in the gPROMS® environment and can be easily adapted to particular plant configurations by simply ?drag-and-drop? of the necessary units from the established model libraries and connect them to simulate a specific integrated process. Each unit presents a dialog box for the user to set the corresponding design and process variables and parameters. This simulator can be used, among other tasks, to perform sensitivity analysis and process optimization, analysis of design changes or flowsheet variations, analysis of different open- or closed-loop operations and as a training tool. Furthermore, all the units are connected by streams characterized by their mass flowrate, particle size and temperature. As a result, variables such as particle size distribution, size guide number and fraction of product on specification can be tracked with time through the units. Finally, using the gPROMS® PMLControl library it is possible to customize the desired control loops to maintain plant operation under nominal conditions or turn it to a new operating point