Mullapudi Narendranath
The Andhra Sugars Limited, India; narendra.tnk@gmail.com
The Andhra Sugars Limited (India) operates three cane sugar plants, producing direct plantation-white sugar. With innovation, good quality sugar meeting EC-2 specifications is being produced at the three plantation-white cane sugar plants without the use of a backend refinery or sophisticated filtration equipment. This paper reports on the technologies and equipment designed, built, and producing sugar meeting EC-2 sugar specifications at The Andhra Sugars Limited. The use of cane diffusers facilitated producing cane juice with low suspended solids. Lime saccharate was introduced for juice liming providing good turbidity reduction. The use of a compact rotary sulphur burner with an ejector gave improved sulphitation compared to the existing system that has a conventional sulphur burner and sulphitation vessel. Using a lamella juice clarifier with 7 min residence time gave clearer juice. The use of a lamella syrup clarifier with 9 min residence time gave clearer clarified syrup. A true seed pan with improved crystallization facilitated producing low colour sugar. Bagasse is being dried using waste heat from the boiler flue gas improving boiler efficiency.