Harjeet Singh Bola1, Boris Morgenroth2 and Saiedeh Wicht2
1IPRO INDIA Pvt Ltd., SCO – 236, Sector 40 D, Chandigarh – 160036, India
2IPRO Industrieprojekt GmbH, Celler Straße 67, 38114 Braunschweig, Germany
A significant improvement and performance enhancement of the pan operation can be achieved by automating the pans with modern pan automation systems. However, the human intervention in the automatic pan operation causes inefficiencies despite having a good automation system. The online optical crystallization monitoring system (CMS) plays an important role in avoiding the human intervention in the pan operation and for further optimizations. The system captures high-precision transilluminated images of sugar crystals flowing through a 10 mm wide gap in the boiling pan and automatically analyses the sugar crystals visible in the images in a size range from 8 µm to 4 mm. This system reports the number of detected microcrystals (<30 µm) and crystals (>30 µm), mean aperture of crystals (MA), co-efficient of variation (CV), crystal growth rate and volume fractions of crystals of different sizes in real time. Due to wash water additions to the pans based on the number of fine crystals measured with CMS, the unnecessary “operator opinion based” water additions to the pans can be avoided. With a good pan automation system with integrated CMS, the water additions to the pans can be minimized to zero which has several cascading benefits. The crystal breakage and the reasons of fine grain formation can be detected, which helps to take remedial actions to avoid repetition of such events. The information about quality of seed magma helps to take actions to improve it, which helps to improve the sugar quality in subsequent crystallization steps. The seeding point and amount of seed magma can be also adjusted with the help of CMS. Experience from pan automation projects with integrated CMS is given.