sugar refinery process.

remove impurities from raw sugar.

Dissolved/melted
Removes colour via affination processes,
melting the brown or raw sugar,
decoloring by passing through carbon filters,
recrystallizing in vacuum boiling pans,
drying.
The affination process
comprises a U-mixer, hot magma mingler, centrifugal and sugar melter.
the raw sugar is softened and the layer of mother liquor which is
surrounding the crystal is removed.
mixed with warm and concentrated syrup of slightly higher purity than
the syrup layer so that it will not dissolve the raw sugar crystals.
resulting magma is centrifuged to separate the resulting syrup from the
melting of the outer layer .
The greater part of the impurities is removed from the input sugar,
leaving the crystals ready for dissolving before further treatment.
The liquor which results from dissolving the washed crystals still
contains some colour.
In the U-mixer raw sugar is stirred with a measured amount of water
before transferring to the mingler for heating and slurrying.
During the purification process, processing techniques is carbonation
which involves adding lime (CaO) to the melted liquor and then passing this
juice through a carbonation vessel where carbon dioxide (CO ) is bubbled up
through the juice.
The reaction of the carbon dioxide with the lime produces a calcium
carbonate precipitate which is the small clumps of chalk grown in the juice.
The clumps are formed to collect a lot of the non-sugars by filtering out
the chalk.
In this stage, processing the liquor is aimed at removing the solids which
make the liquor turbid and some of the colour is removed too.
Once this is done, the sugar liquor is now ready for decolourization.
2

In the decolourisation process, the technique that is used to remove the

colour from the sugar juice is ion exchange resins or styrenic resins. The
decolourisers are of the strong-base anionic type, with quaternary amine

functional groups. They are operated in the chloride form. Styrenic resins have a
higher decolourisation power because of their ability to fix colorants both
through ionic bonds to the ionic active groups and through hydrophobic
interactions with the resin matrix. Hydrophobic interactions increase with salt
concentration, explaining the difficulty of using salt solutions to remove
colorants fixed to the resin matrix. The colourless solution is known as fine
liquor.
Evaporative crystallisation of the 98 Pol (sucrose purity) decolourised
syrup occurs in a double-effect evaporator.
The solution becomes supersaturated when the water evaporates from the
syrup.
The mix is seeded with fine sucrose crystals which initiate uniform
crystal growth.
Most of the colour bodies are excluded from the crystal as the crystals
grow.
The massecuite is then dropped into a centrifugal where the crystals are
separated from the remaining liquor.
washed with a small amount of hot water to remove any colour bodies.
The liquor now at a reduced purity of 92-94 Pol is sent to vacuum pan
for further crystallisation of white sugar.
The vacuum pan is heated by the vapour from the previous effect so it has
to be operated at a lower temperature and therefore lower pressure.
The sugar produced from the vacuum pan is higher in colour than from
the effect, but still meeting white sugar specifications.
The resulting syrup is called molasses.
Drying
The wet crystals are discharged through a rotating drum into which hot
air is continuously blown to remove moisture and dry the crystals.
At the exit of the dryer the crystals are cooled and passed through a sieve
to grade the crystal size.
dust formed during this process is removed by vacuum
sugar conveyed to the packing area for final packing into 50kg bags.