Webinar Series: Agrochemical Industry

In the area of formulation development or in quality control, many companies make do with modified planetary ball mills, sample shakers or special mixers on a very small scale. This practice certainly allows predictions to be made from very small sample batches, but it provides results with very limited transferability to production scale on agitator bead mills.

The DeltaVita^® 1 dual centrifuge is based on the advanced development of a classic centrifuge. In contrast to a conventional centrifuge rotor, the rotor is equipped with two symmetrically arranged rotary plates. The rotary plates can be fitted with different adapters for holding sample vessels with volumes between 2 ml and approx. 150 ml.

Extensive investigations have shown that this universally applicable laboratory instrument for comminution, dispersing and mixing processes can be used to make predictions regarding quality of active materials, grindability, formulation stability, the correct grinding media size and the achievable product quality. In addition, it was shown that these results can be transferred with very good reproducibility and accuracy to results obtained with agitator bead mills using the same grinding media.

Currently the production of plant protectives is gaining in strategic importance. It must be re-evaluated to put more emphasis on environmental restrictions, in both production in the chemical process and in agriculture when spreading on crops. However, the challenge to feed the world´s population continues to be an issue. The role of the chemical industry is to produce plant protectives in the best way. The selection of the most suitably adapted milling technology contributes to this.

This contribution shows you an overview of the NETZSCH dry grinding program, what NETZSCH recommends for the production of agrochemical specialties, such as WP‘s and WDG‘s. Additionally we are pointing out the criteria for selecting the appropriate technology to your products and processes, based on characteristic features like productivity, product quality, cleaning and emission aspect as well as temperature aspects and operations safety. Finally you will get an insight into technical design of the different machines, as well as their functions and features.

ProPhi is the NETZSCH solution for the fast and efficient coarse and pre-grinding of suspensions in a highflow recirculation process.

The initial particle size for some products in applications like agrochemical industry or printing inks contain coarse crystalline particles, or are agglomerated to particle up to the mm range. Most pre-dispersion processes are not able to comminute these particles to the required size, to receive either the final quality or to allow the subsequent fine grinding process step.

ProPhi provides particle size distributions that allow the final fine grinding step using smallest grinding media and thus significantly reducing the total energy requirement for the preparation of such products.

Following the process chain for production of formulations in agrochemicals a huge number of different requirements and specifications have to be considered. Starting from raw material characteristics and its handling, followed by formulation processing and finally its conditioning, each process and product requires its individual solution. Process safety and guaranteed performance with regard to production capacities and final product quality are highest demands. Special technical features, with regard to safety criteria for human health, environmental pollution and waste management are getting more and more important for futures process concepts.

Based on the Netzsch principles for the definition and design of complete process solutions, this contribution shows you herein after NETZSCH key technologies for mixing, emulsifying and wet grinding processes for agrochemical applications, from the laboratory to the production scale, suitable for the agro chemicals applications.

Providing sufficient food for the rapid growing world`s population is definitely the major challenge of the 21st century, as it must be realized with regard to environmental changes like climate, limited arable land and other limited resources like water and raw materials. Sustainable process solutions will be required to keep the balance between on the one side economical aspects like productivity and efficiency, reliability, product quality, etc. and on the other side the environmental and ecological aspects like reduction of energy costs, resource saving processes, emiison free processes, waste reduction, etc.

Under the aspect of sustainability such processes just can be developed and designed when the machine producer/process designer is familiar with these new requirements and needs for agrochemical production processes. Based on these new challenges new ideas and invents will lead to optimized technologies and new process solutions.

This contribution discusses the NETZSCH expertise on sustainable customized solutions for agrochemical production processes. It shoes that just by few essential optimizations at the elementary process steps of an agrochemical production process will lead to a sustainable process solutions. This is not only related to new process designs, but also applicable for an optimization of existing process lines with minimal effort.

When faced with developing of formulations, innovative strategies and laboratory equipment in the early development stages are essential to the success of your project. Wet and dry preparation, mixing, dispersing and de-aeration, as well as classifying processes are difficult to perfect without laboratory machines. They are used for development of new products, for processing smallest quantities for basic R&D, for quality control, quality assurance and last but not least for process optimization. The reproducibility of the results that are achieved is an essential point. The ease of operation and the high degree of flexibility is a plus. In the webinar the functional principle of different laboratory machines and the transferability to the real production scale will be discussed.