Sugar Plant Sugarcane is a perennial herb belonging to the grass family.

Native to tropical and subtropical regions of the world, this tropical grass is 10-24-feet tall, bears long, pointed leaves, and has several stalks. The segmented stalks have a bud at each joint and as the plant matures, small flowers appear. THE DIFFERENT TYPES There are a bewildering number of sugars and syrups available in the shops while other types are available for the industrial user. Some of the basic differences are discussed below. White sugar is essentially pure sucrose and there is no difference between that derived from cane and that from beet. Different manufacturers produce crystals of different sizes however and this leads to some apparent differences. Smaller crystals dissolve more readily and might therefore appear to be sweeter because none is left at the bottom of the cup and they seem sweeter on the tongue if eaten alone. Similarly smaller crystals have more surfaces per spoonful and appear whiter than larger crystals. [Having said that, some white sugars are less white than others: it depends on how much processing the manufacturer applies.] There are several speciality white sugars:

caster sugar is just a very small crystal size white sugar icing sugar is ground up white sugar, essentially sugar dust sugar cubes are lumps of sugar crystals "glued" together with a sugar syrup preserving sugar is a special large crystal

Brown sugars come in many different styles but are essentially one of two types: sticky browns and free-flowing browns. The sticky browns were originally the sort of mixture that comes out of a cane sugar crystallising pan. The extreme of this, still made in India today, is "juggeri" or "gur" which is essentially such a mixture boiled until dry. In modern refining practice both of these types are made by mixing a refined or at least purified sugar with a suitable syrup. The colour of the sugar and the syrup determines the colour of the final product and the ratio of syrup to sugar plus any drying applied determines whether the product is sticky or free-flowing. Syrups, of which there are again an enormous range, range from pure sucrose solutions as sold to industrial users to heavily treated syrups incorporating flavours and colours. Refiners or "Golden" syrup is a sugar solution which has been carefully treated to invert some of the sucrose. Inversion is a chemical process which breaks down the disaccharide sucrose to its constituent sugars: glucose and fructose. This helps ensure that crystallisation does not occur during

storage. Treacle is a similar product made from molasses rather than a pure sugar STEPS INVOLVED IN MAKING SUGAR PLANTING Sugarcane cuttings are planted in fields by workers or mechanical planters. In order for the cane to grow, the seeds must be planted in well-drained soil. Typical cane soil is made of a mixture of silt, sand, clay particles and organic matter. Canes are spaced at least 4-feet apart and lined in rows and covered with soil. Fertilizers are applied from the time of planting up until the beginning of the ripening period. Cane fields are also routinely weeded to provide for optimum growth of the cane. Depending on the region where the crop is planted, cane seasons last from 8-22 months. In the United States, sugarcane is grown in Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana and Texas. COLLECTING THE HARVEST Mature canes are gathered by a combination of manual and mechanical methods. Canes are cut at ground level, its leaves are removed and the top is trimmed off by cutting off the last mature joint. Cane is then placed into large piles and picked up, tied, and transported to a sugar factory. CLEANSING AND GRINDING Stalks are thoroughly washed and cut when reaching the sugar mill. After the cleaning process, a machine led by a series of rotating knives, shreds the cane into pieces. This is known as "grinding." During grinding, hot water is sprayed on to the sugarcane to dissolve any remaining hard sugar. The smaller pieces of cane are then spread out on a conveyer belt. JUICING The shredded pieces of sugarcane travel on the conveyer belt through a series of heavy-duty rollers, which extract juice from the pulp. The pulp that remains or "bagasse" is dried and used as fuel. The raw juice moves on through the mill to be clarified. CLARIFYING Carbon dioxide and the milk of a lime are added to the liquid sugar mixture and it is heated to the boiling point, as the process of clarifying begins. As the carbon dioxide travels through the liquid it forms calcium carbonate, which attracts nonsugar debris (fats, gums, and wax) from the juice, and pulls them away from the sugar juice. The juice is then pushed through a series of filters to remove any remaining impurities. EVAPORATION The clear juice which results from the clarifying process is put under a vacuum, where the juice boils at a low temperature and begins to evaporate. It is heated until it forms into a thick, brown syrup. CRYSTALLIZATION By evaporating what little water is left in the sugar syrup, crystallization takes place. Inside a sterilized vacuum pan, pulverized sugar is fed into the pan as the

liquid evaporates, causing the formation of crystals. The remaining mixture is a thick mass of large crystals, which is sent to a centrifuge to spin and dry the crystals. The dried product is raw sugar, still inedible. REFINERY Raw sugar is transported to a Cane Sugar Refinery for the removal molasses, minerals and other non-sugars, which still contaminate the sugar. This is known as the purification process. Raw sugar is mixed with a solution of sugar and water to loosen the molasses from the outside of the raw sugar crystals, producing a thick matter known as "magma." Large machines then spin the magma, which separate the molasses from the crystals. Crystals are promptly washed, dissolved and filtered to remove impurities. The golden syrup which is produced is then sent through filters to remove the color and water. What's left is a concentrated, clear syrup, which is again fed into a vacuum pan. SEPARATION AND PACKAGING Once the final evaporation and drying process is done, screens separate the different sized sugar crystals. Large and small crystals are packaged and shipped, labeled as white, refined, sugar.

DETAILS: TECHNOLOGY/PROCESS DESCRIPTION: Ponni Sugars produces sugar from sugarcane .Ponni is the first sugar mill in the country to use alternative fuel in its boilers and release its bagasse in entirety for paper making. The production process is as shown below.

How Sugar is Refined Raw sugar is made in tropical countries where sugar cane can be grown profitably. It is then shipped in bulk to a refinery in the country where the sugar is required. It now has to be finally cleaned up, purified and made ready for the consumer. It helps to think of refining as a series of steps from left to right where colour and non-sugars are concentrating to the left and pure sugar is concentrating to the right. However the raw sugar comes into the process to the left of centre, not at one end. In the description that follows the flow of sugar is followed first and then the remainder of the process is reviewed.

Affination The first stage of processing the raw sugar is to soften and then remove the layer of mother liquor surrounding the crystals with a process called "affination". The raw sugar is mixed with a warm, concentrated syrup of slightly higher purity than the syrup layer so that it will not dissolve the crystals. The resulting magma is centrifuged to separate the crystals from the syrup thus removing the greater part of the impurities from the input sugar and leaving the crystals ready for dissolving before further treatment. The liquor which results from dissolving the washed crystals still contains some colour, fine particles, gums and resins and other non-sugars.

Carbonatation The first stage of processing the liquor is aimed at removing the solids which make the liquor turbid. Coincidentally some of the colour is removed too. One of the two common processing techniques is known as carbonatation where small clumps of chalk are grown in the juice. The clumps, as they form, collect a lot of the non-sugars so that by filtering out the chalk one also takes out the nonsugars. Once this is done, the sugar liquor is now ready for decolourisation. The other technique, phosphatation, is chemically similar but uses phosphate rather than carbonate formation.

Decolourisation There are also two common methods of colour removal in refineries, both relying on absorption techniques with the liquor being pumped through columns of medium. One option open to the refiner is to use granular activated carbon [GAC] which removes most colour but little else. The carbon is regenerated in a hot kiln where the colour is burnt off from the carbon. The other option is to use an ion exchange resin which removes less colour than GAC but also removes some of the inorganics present. The resin is regenerated chemically which gives rise to large quantities of unpleasant liquid effluents. The clear, lightly coloured liquor is now ready for crystallisation except that it is a little too dilute for optimum energy consumption in the refinery. It is therefore evaporated prior to going to the crystallisation pan.

Boiling In the pan even more water is boiled off until conditions are right for sugar crystals to grow. You may have done something like this at school but probably not with sugar because it is difficult to get the crystals to grow well. In the factory the workers throw in some sugar dust to initiate crystal formation. Once the crystals have grown the resulting mixture of crystals and mother liquor is spun in centrifuges to separate the two, rather like washing is spin dried. The crystals are then given a final dry with hot air before being packed and/or stored ready for despatch.

Recovery The liquor left over from the preparation of white sugar and the washings from the affination stage both contain sugar which it is economic to recover. They are therefore sent to the recovery house which operates rather like a raw sugar factory, aiming to make a sugar with a quality comparable to the washed raws after the affination stage. As with the other sugar processes, one cannot get all of the sugar out of the liquor and therefore there is a sweet by-product made: refiners' molasses. This is usually turned into a cattle food or is sent to a distillery where alcohol is made. Extraction There are several important aspects to extraction which involve the energy balance of the factory, the efficiency of extraction and therefore ultimately the profitability of operations:

The manager needs to process the cane as soon as possible if sugar losses are to be avoided yet needs to have a sufficient supply in storage for times when cutting and transport are stopped, whether deliberately or not. Typically, cane is processed within 24 hours of cutting; Cane preparation is critical to good sugar extraction, particularly with diffusion extraction. This is achieved with rotating knives and sometimes hammer mills called "shredders". However shredding requires extra energy and more equipment; The extraction is actually conducted as a counter-current process using fresh hot water at one end being pumped in the opposite direction to the cane. The more water that is used, the more sugar is extracted but the more dilute the mixed juice is and hence the more energy that is required to evaporate the juice;

The more accurately that the mills are set [adjusted], the drier is the residual fibre and hence the less sugar remaining in the fibre;

A typical mixed juice from extraction will contain perhaps 15% sugar and the residual fibre, called bagasse, will contain 1 to 2% sugar, about 50% moisture and some of the sand and grit from the field as "ash". A typical cane might contain 12 to 14% fibre which, at 50% moisture content gives about 25 to 30 tons of bagasse per 100 tons of cane or 10 tons of sugar. Evaporation The mixed juice from extraction is preheated prior to liming so that the clarification is optimal. The milk of lime, calcium hydroxide or Ca(OH)2, is metered into the juice to hold the required ratio and the limed juice enters a gravitational settling tank: a clarifier. The juice travels through the clarifier at a very low superficial velocity so that the solids settle out and clear juice exits. The mud from the clarifier still contains valuable sugar so it is filtered on rotary vacuum filters where the residual juice is extracted and the mud can be washed before discharge, producing a sweet water . The juice and the sweet water are returned to process. The clear juice has probably only 15% sugar content but saturated sugar liquor, required before crystallisation can occur, is close to 80% sugar content. Evaporation in a steam heated multiple effect evaporator is the best way of approaching the saturated condition because low pressure water vapours can be produced for heating duties elsewhere in the factory. The evaporator sets the steam consumption of the factory and is designed to match the energy balance of the entire site: the manager wants to avoid burning auxiliary fuel and equally wants to avoid paying to dispose of surplus bagasse. The greater the number of effects, the less steam is required to drive the first effect. Each subsequent effect is heated by the vapour from the previous effect so has to be operated at a lower temperature and therefore lower pressure. Boiling Physical chemistry assists with sugar purification during the crystallisation process because there is a natural tendency for the sugar crystals to form as pure sucrose, rejecting the non-sugars. Thus, when the sugar crystals are grown in the mother liquor they tend to be pure and the mother liquor becomes more impure. Most remaining non-sugar in the product is contained in the coating of mother liquor left on the crystals The mother liquor still contains valuable sugar of course so the crystallisation is repeated several times. However non-sugars inhibit the crystallisation. This is particularly true of other sugars such as glucose and fructose which are the breakdown products of sucrose. Each subsequent step therefore becomes more difficult until one reaches a point where it is no longer viable to continue. The crystallisation step itself - a "boiling" - takes place in a vacuum pan: a large closed kettle with steam heated pipes. [In practice the heating is done with a low

pressure water vapour from the evaporator.] Some modern pans are continuous flow devices but most are batch devices which go through a discrete cycle and are then emptied for a new boiling. A typical cycle might be 4 hours long. The mixture of crystals and mother liquor from a boiling, called the "massecuite", is dropped into a receiving tank called a crystalliser where it is cooled down and the crystals continue to grow. This also releases the pan for a new boiling. From the crystalliser the massecuite is fed to the centrifuges. In a raw sugar factory it is normal to conduct three boilings. The first or "A" boiling produces the best sugar which is sent to store. The "B" boiling takes longer and the retention time in the crystalliser is also longer if a reasonable crystal size is to be achieved. Some factories re-melt the B sugar to provide part of the A boiling feedstock, others use the crystals as seed for the A boilings and others mix the B sugar with the A sugar for sale. The "C" boiling takes proportionally longer than the B boiling and considerably longer to crystallise. The sugar is usually used as seed for B boilings and the rest is re-melted.