In the middle of a busy sugar factory, where the air smells sweet like molasses, is the boiler. The boiler is the most important part of making sugar, but not all boilers are good for making sugar. Picking the right boiler is important because it can make the difference between making a lot of good sugar and wasting a lot of money.

The main types of boilers used in sugar factories are biomass and bagasse boilers. These boilers are good because they can turn the waste from making sugar into steam and power. This is good for the environment and saves a lot of money on fuel, so it’s a good choice for making sugar in a way that’s good for the environment and saves money.

The boilers in sugar factories don’t just make heat，but also save fuel cost. Factory makes sugar. they help factory save money and take care of the environment.

What Kind of Boiler Is Used in Sugar Factories?

The main boilers used in sugar factories are biomass and bagasse boilers. Bagasse is the fibrous waste left over after sugar cane is crushed to make juice. This waste can be used to make heat, which is a good way to use something that would otherwise go to waste. These boilers are made to work with different kinds of bagasse.

Biomass and bagasse steam boiler belongs to the SZL series boiler, it is a horizontal dual cylinder arranged, chain grating, pipe steam, designed by our technical personnel according to advanced technology and experiences from home and abroad. The technology, performance, and environmental protective index of this series of products reach the international advanced level, and this product is the mainstay in the boiler industry.

This series of boilers absorbs the merits of the quick-fitting boiler, features with compact structure, the boiler's shop is story arranged, convenient for site installation, short in the construction period, cheap in cost, simple in operation, and etc.

How Is Sugar Made?

Sugar comes in different forms, but the most common kind is granulated sugar, also known as table sugar. Sugar with big crystals is called coarse sugar, and sugar with small crystals is called superfine sugar. Other kinds of sugar are brown sugar, powdered sugar, pearl sugar, muscovado sugar, turbinado-style sugar, and demerara-style sugar.

Stages in a Sugar Mill:

Sugar cane or sugar beet goes through several stages of processing before it gets to the store. The stages in the sugar industry include:

Washing:

When sugar cane or sugar beet arrives at the sugar mill from the farm, it is washed before it goes any further. Washing takes place on belts sprayed with water or flue gases containing water. The products are washed by rotating and removing dirt in a rotating drum sprayed with water. Sugar cane is crushed by rollers or swing-hammer shredders and then sprayed with hot water. Sugar beet is sliced into small strips called cossettes and soaked in hot water to make the plant cells swell for the extraction process.

Extraction:

Sugar cane is extracted by milling, where a series of mills crush the sugar cane fiber to separate the juice from the bagasse that can be used as a fuel source. The juice that is collected is dark green in color and acidic with the sugar concentration measured. Sugar beet is filled into tanks that are 10 to 20 meters long that carry the sugar beet up through a rotating shaft as the sugar is extracted.

Purifying Juice:

In this stage, the sugar cane juice that was extracted is further purified in a tall tower-like structure. The sulfur dioxide vapor at the bottom starts to rise in a process called sulfitation. Carbonation is used to further separate soluble non-sugar material from sugar juice. Carbonation consists of calcium carbonate or calcium sulfite that helps to precipitate. The juice is heated to change the protein properties and then mixed with calcium hydroxide. Carbon dioxide bubbles are added to reduce the alkalinity and the sludge formation that needs filtration to purify the juice.

This process can take several hours and the sludge is filtered to remove the remaining sugar. The purified juice is then boiled in a series of evaporators until it reaches a sugar concentration of 50% to 65%.

Crystallization:

Crystallization is a big stage that uses a steam boiler. In the crystallization process, a vacuum pan evaporates the syrup to be saturated with sugar crystals by a process called seeding. This seed is pure sucrose suspended in alcohol and glycerin that is added to the syrup. The tiny grains of sugar in the solution help to extract the sugar in the solution and turn it into crystals. With the boiling of the mixture in the vacuum pan, the crystals turn into a paste called ‘massecuite’ that is a mixture of sugar crystal and syrup. The mixture is then put into a big container called a ‘crystallizer’ to continue crystallization by stirring and cooling the massecuite.

Centrifugation:

The massecuite is put into a high-speed centrifuge to separate sugar crystals and molasses. The centrifuge spins at 1000 to 2800 revolutions per minute to remove the molasses and keep the sugar in the centrifuge basket. After the centrifugation process, the sugar is washed with water.

Drying:

Large hot air dryers are used to dry damp sugar crystals and reduce their moisture content to as low as 0.02% and then pass them through hot air in a granulator. The dried crystals are then sorted by size and packed to be sent to the store.

How to Choose the Right Boiler for a Sugar Factory?

Sugar factory boilers can be very big, but they can also be small. It depends on how big the factory is and how much cane they are processing. I will tell you how to figure out how big a boiler needs to be based on how big the factory is, and how this affects how good the boiler is and how much sugar they can make.

1. Figure out the capacity of the boiler. The boiler capacity should be based on the Heating Load Curve or Heat Balance Diagram, and include the heat loss in pipelines, self-used heat of boiler room, available used waste heat. While it’s usually hard to get the Heating Load Curve, the heating load can be based on the max thermal consumption per hour within production/heating/domestic, and then determined by using the coefficient.

2. Figure out the boiler heating parameters, including pressure, temperature, etc.

3. Figure out the boiler efficiency. In order to benefit for economic management, the boilers should have high thermal efficiency, and the boiler output, quantity and other performances have to adapt to the change of heat loading.

4. It’s better to choose the boilers with same capacity or combustion equipment. If different, the max limitation is two models, to decrease the problems of equipment layout and management.

How Does a Boiler Make Steam in Sugar Factory?

You need to know how a boiler works to understand why it is important to make sugar. That means you need to understand how the water gets hot, how steam is made, how the steam gets hotter (if it needs to), and how the steam gets to where it is supposed to go. A steam boiler is an energy conversion device that uses the heat energy released by fuel combustion to heat water into steam with certain parameters. The steam boiler is not an independent device, but a complete set of boiler system.

The fuel is charged and ignited in the furnace to generate flame and high-temperature flue gas, and the heat is continuously transferred to the water in the pot through the flame and high-temperature flue gas, and the water in the pot is continuously flow circulation, heat absorption and vaporization to generate steam. A good boiler will plan a multi-bend flue gas flow, which is to allow the high-temperature gas after combustion to extend its journey in the furnace body, which can improve the heat conversion rate.

Conclusion

Boilers are a big deal in sugar factories. They do a lot of things, and they affect everything from how good the factory is to how much the factory hurts the earth. The boilers that use biomass and bagasse are the best because they are cheap and good for the earth. As we talk about how steam is made and used in sugar factories, we know that picking the right boiler is not just a technical thing; it is a smart thing to do to make money and not hurt the earth.

We hope that this little article has answered some of your questions about boilers. But we know that the more you learn, the less you know. That means we know that this article did not answer all your questions and maybe made some new questions. Please call us or call our people to get more information.

Thank you for reading this article and thinking about CN BOILER for your next energy project.If you want to know about the numbers and prices for boilers, please call us at +0086 132-9831-1147.

What Type of Boiler is Used in Sugar Factory?