VIBRATION CONTROL IN PRILLING Gabriele Marcon, Casale, Switzerland, charts the development of a new vibrating prilling bucket for urea producers.
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oupling efficiency with product quality is nowadays the main goal pursued by any urea producer, whilst at the same time fulfilling increasingly stringent sustainability requirements. With that in mind, Casale has recently developed a solution aimed at improving product quality in the prilling finishing section, before dispatching the product to users. The R&D project, carried out with the support of Donald Snyder (founder of Tuttle Prilling Systems), focused on the development of a vibrating prilling bucket – the Vibrating Skin Bucket (VSB) – that is now available on the market.
From R&D programme to first industrial application The key features of the bucket (Figure 1) are:
Suitable for prilling towers with a diameter of up to 28 m. Uniform prill size distribution. Low dust emissions. Low prill temperature. Able to function in a wide range of operating conditions. The R&D programme led, firstly, to the design of the bucket and then to the execution of experimental tests at pilot scale to validate the theoretical calculations. The testing activities provided promising results, so the decision was taken to prove the technology at the industrial scale. The first industrial application has now been successfully completed and the technology is available on the market for both small and large capacity urea plants. 29
