Marion Janker, Formulation Chemist, Syngenta Crop Protection Münchwilen AG marion.janker
Tom Salvesen, Statistician, Syngenta Crop Protection Monthey SA Tomsalvo
One of the formulations Syngenta sells to its customers is a water-dispersible granule (WG). This is a solid formulation, intended for easy dispersion in a farmer’s spray tank. Standard methods are available to assess the various properties of the formulation, for example, measures of how well the formulation disperses. The manufacturing process for WG has many challenges: slurry preparation; pre-milling and bead milling to reach the desired particle size distribution; and the granulation of a water-based slurry to give a finely granulated, easy-to-disperse product for our customers. While the effects of the milling process on a slurry are well understood, the granulation process and its scale are not. In an effort to understand the variability of the product, all available data from the various tests on the WG has been consolidated into JMP. After some data manipulation to make the recorded data analysable, the data was analysed using various JMP tools, including distributions and sample statistics, visualisation in form of the Graph Builder and modelling.
