Dusty urea product often leads to uncomfortable discussions between a urea producer and their clients. Dusty product leads to caking and causes unpleasant and even hazardous working conditions for any employee working with such a product. Additionally, dusty urea can cause damage to crops, leading to reduced yields in the agricultural sector.
Dusty urea product is typically caused by operation parameters of the evaporation section in the urea melt plant, operation parameters of the granulation section, storage conditions and logistic procedures. In most of these cases an end-of pipe solution is the most efficient and cost-effective solution to improve the product quality and produce premium-grade urea. The “Van Bommel Dedusting Technology” (VBDT) offers such a solution.

The VBDT was developed in 1992, and has since been in continuous operation at a modern fluid bed urea granulation plant in North America.
The original VBDT design was a one-line unit with a design capacity of 200 metric tons per hour. It was capable of breaking up the soft lumps with a diameter larger than 8 mm), take out fines and broken product (90 µm – 1.0 mm), and remove dust & ultra-fines (1 µm – 90 µm). The design made it possible to guarantee an “on-spec” premium-grade urea granular product of between 1.0 mm and 4.0 mm at variable feed rates.
The line was expanded in 1994 to 500 metric tons per hour. The VBDT has also been implemented at various DAP & MAP plants.
The VBDT can optionally perform cooling of the product and warehouse air-refreshment to improve visibility during unloading and loading operations.