STATISTICAL STUDY AND MODELING OF THE EFFECT OF PHOSPHORIC ACID IMPURITIES ON THE PHYSICAL QUALITY OF AMMONIUM PHOSPHATE DETERMINED FROM THE PRODUCTION DATA
Résumé
Fertilizer producing entity, OCP group.SA, Jorf lasfar, BP118 – 24025 El Jadida, Maroc Ammonium phosphate fertilizer is produced by simple reaction (neutralization) between ammonia and phosphoric acid resulting in the formation of the basic salt.
The knowledge of the physical properties of fertilizers presents a lot of interest at different level. All the problems dealing with the behavior of the particles (segregation, spreading, granulation, hardness…) need a better characterization of the fertilizers in order to understand and/or predict them.
Several works were carried out to define and control the effect of impurities from phosphoric acid on the physicochemical properties of ammonium phosphates fertilizers. In the investigation of the influence of elements such as Fe, Al, MgO, F-, SiO2, Na2O, K2O and Cl- on fertilizer quality, we followed the production lines of Ammonium phosphate fertilizers for several months, even more than a year.
The aim of the current work is the statistical study and modeling the effect of phosphoric acid qualities on the physical quality of fertilizers such as granulation yield, grain size, and the average diameter of granules D50, based on the analysis of data from different production lines by applying the Principal Components Analysis (PCA). In addition models were constructed using Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN).