<p>The demand for fertilizers in the agricultural sector has increased drastically with the world's exponential growth. Moreover, solid granular fertilizers remain by far the most requested. The granular fertilizers production presents several kinds of problems, especially the ternary fertilizers family. The caking is a severe issue that affects granules' physical quality, particularly during storage and transport. It makes them unsuitable for their intended uses. In this work, a new anti-caking agent has been developed to cope with the granular fertilizer caking problem and improve their physical quality. First of all, thanks to the screening design of Plackett-Burman, the effect of seven anti-caking components on the phosphate fertilizer caking trend was evaluated only by eight trials. Next, a mixture design was used to formulate a new anti-caking agent from three components (glycerol, calcium carbonate, and molasses). The screening design was chosen as the most effective components. Finally, from the mixture design results, a special cubic model was postulated and statically validated. The model delivered a wide range of compositions formulated from the three components mentioned above, capable of reducing the caking tendency of ternary granular fertilizer.</p>
<p>Yields improvement of the crop depends on many parameters witch each of them acts for a specific manner to boost the plant growth and allow the soil to be more efficient to any kind of plant. Our research is based on the implementation of elemental sulfur into the preparation of triple superphosphate fertilizer and its dispersion into the blend. By adding a small amount of it to the mixture, sulfur particles disperse uniformly by using additives in the phosphate fertilizer.</p><p>This technique is successfully reached by integrating many additives obtained from different chemical industries to spread out the sulfur particle in the fertilizer.</p><p>Several experiments were done by adopting the experimental design methodology (DOE) related to a screening mixture design to select the best surfactant used. So, nine commercial products with different chemical proprieties have been evaluated as a dispersant of elemental sulfur in triple superphosphate fertilizer. First, thanks to the screening mixture design, three products have been chosen for this formulation. Second, by using the mixture design method, new dispersants of elemental sulfur in triple superphosphate fertilizer have been reached. With this method, apart from it is being possible to obtain several dispersants, it is also possible to control the distribution and the average of the particle diameter of the elemental sulfur. Moreover, statistical validation tests confirm the achievement of the sulfur particle size of approximately 1000 µm.</p>
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