Chemical Sugar Loss Reduction in a Sugar Refinery

• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Patrícia da Conceição Rodrigues
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/53145
• topic: Sugar Refining Process; Colorants; Chemical Loss; Invert; Inversion; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Química

The sugar industry is a mature market, whereby it is essential to increase the monetary margin by reducing inefficiencies. The aim of this study was then to find the causes responsible for the chemical losses throughout the refining process in a way to reduce them. To identify 20% of the causes contributing to 80% of the invert problem, the Pareto chart of the year FY17 (from October 16 to September 17) was analyzed. With this it was possible to perceive that the affination, melting and recovery are the three parts of the process that most contribute to the problem of the chemical losses. At first, we acted on the number of washes of the affination centrifuges. It was tested if applying two washes instead of one in the centrifuges would aid in the removal of color, ash and invert. It was concluded that this action increases the removal of color in 46%, of ash in 58% and of invert in 66%, when a raw sugar with a color about 3600 UI, ash about 0.30% and invert about 1.50% is being processed. Two washes allow to reduce about three times the cost related to the chemical losses, being able to lead to savings of about 139K€ in the year FY19 (October 18 to September 19). This test was subsequently carried out in the same way in the A sugar centrifuges, a product of the recovery, and it was concluded that the two washes had a gain of about 11% in the removal of color, 8% in the removal of ash and 10% in the removal of invert. In the dissolution of scalp and dust collectors, an invert analysis of all the streams/tanks was performed. With this it was detected that the tank which collects the sugar dust of the dryers’ room had invert values of about 12%, due to the high microbiological activity. Corrective actions were taken in the weekly cleaning procedure of this tank, reducing the amount of invert to about 2%, verifying that it is possible to maintain the sustainability of the study.