Atena Project – France
EMT installs state of the art fertilizer handling factory in la Rochelle, France.
In the first quarter of 2023, EMT successfully installed a state-of-the-art Urea treating, NPK blending, sieving, and coating line for fertilizers with a central capacity of 120 tonnes per hour installed for Atena in La Rochelle-Cedex.
The production line is a complex factory which consists out of three parts: the Urea coating-line the NPK-line and the central blend and discharge line. The Urea-line starts with a 10.5-ton weighing hopper equipped with a conditioner which breaks the material back to 15mm. The line can either screen out the dust or bypass the screens and transport the material straight to the coating unit. Liquid can be added to the raw materials at the coating screw. In the coating screw, a Urease inhibitor can be added through a liquid. This ensures that the nitrogen from the urea is retained longer at the plant’s roots, thus reducing nutrient loss.
The NPK-line starts with a four-hopper weighcont blender which transports the material to an elevator. Following the elevator, the material can also either be screened for fines or this screen can be bypassed to discharge the material directly onto the coarse screen.
On the coarse screen the two lines merge again and are fed into the blending screw where powders or liquid can be added to the total blend. A sample of the final mix is automatically taken periodically so that the composition of the mix can be independently checked. The final product is moved by a second elevator to a conveyor to be either distributed to the bulk bays or to a bagging line 70 meters onwards in the middle of the warehouse.
At EMT, we know that with such a factory line, many factors have to be taken into account, such as the characteristics of the raw materials and the required specifications of the final product. For this project, these characteristics and specifications meant that there was a need for two different treatment lines, namely coating one product before mixing the final blend.
Moreover, the desired capacity is crucial when designing a production line like this, and for this project, the double screen setup in the urea line was chosen, among others, to achieve the desired capacity of 120 tonnes per hour. With the double screen arrangement, the screen is no longer a bottleneck in the production process, enabling the higher capacity of the production line.
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