Sugar refinery - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

A sugar
Sugar
Sugar is a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavor.Sucrose in its refined form primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet...

refinery
Refinery
A refinery is a production facility composed of a group of chemical engineering unit processes and unit operations refining certain materials or converting raw material into products of value.-Types of refineries:Different types of refineries are as follows:...

is a factory

Factory

A factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where laborers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production...

which refines raw sugar.

Many cane sugar mills produce raw sugar, i.e. sugar with more colour and therefore more impurities than the white sugar which is normally consumed in households and used as an ingredient in soft drink

Soft drink

A soft drink is a non-alcoholic beverage that typically contains water , a sweetener, and a flavoring agent...

s, cookies and so forth. Raw sugar is either processed into white sugar in local refinieries and sold to the local industry and consumers or it is exported and further processed in the country of destination.

While cane sugar does not strictly need refining, beet sugar

Sugar beet

Sugar beet, a cultivated plant of Beta vulgaris, is a plant whose tuber contains a high concentration of sucrose. It is grown commercially for sugar production. Sugar beets and other B...

is almost always refined to remove the strong, almost always unwanted, taste of beets from it.

The sugar refineries are often located in heavy sugar-consuming regions such as North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

, Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, and Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. Since the 1990s many state-of-the art sugar refieries have been built in the MENA

MENA

The term MENA, for "Middle East and North Africa", is an acronym often used in academic, military planning and business writing.The term covers an extensive region, extending from Morocco to Iran, including the majority of both the Middle Eastern and Maghreb countries...

region, e.g. in Dubai

Dubai

Dubai is a city and emirate in the United Arab Emirates . The emirate is located south of the Persian Gulf on the Arabian Peninsula and has the largest population with the second-largest land territory by area of all the emirates, after Abu Dhabi...

, Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...

and Algeria

Algeria

Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

. In the second stage, white sugar is produced that is more than 99 percent pure sucrose

Sucrose

Sucrose is the organic compound commonly known as table sugar and sometimes called saccharose. A white, odorless, crystalline powder with a sweet taste, it is best known for its role in human nutrition. The molecule is a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose with the molecular formula...

. In such refineries, raw sugar is further purified. Whereas many sugar mills only operate during a limited time of the year during the cane harvesting period, many sugar refineries work the whole year round.

The world´s largest sugar refinery company is American Sugar Refining

American Sugar Refining

American Sugar Refining, Inc., headquartered in Yonkers, New York, is the world’s largest cane sugar refining company, with a production capacity of more than seven million tons of sugar...

with facilities in North America and Europe.

Affination

The raw sugar is stored in large warehouses and then transported into the sugar refinery by means of transport belts. In the traditional refining process, the raw sugar is first mixed with heavy syrup and centrifuge

Centrifuge

A centrifuge is a piece of equipment, generally driven by an electric motor , that puts an object in rotation around a fixed axis, applying a force perpendicular to the axis...

d to wash away the outer coating of the raw sugar crystals, which is less pure than the crystal interior. Many sugar refineries today buy high pol sugar and can do without the affination process.

Purification

The remaining sugar is then dissolved to make a syrup (about 70 percent by weight solids), which is clarified by the addition of phosphoric acid

Phosphoric acid

Phosphoric acid, also known as orthophosphoric acid or phosphoric acid, is a mineral acid having the chemical formula H3PO4. Orthophosphoric acid molecules can combine with themselves to form a variety of compounds which are also referred to as phosphoric acids, but in a more general way...

and calcium hydroxide

Calcium hydroxide

Calcium hydroxide, traditionally called slaked lime, is an inorganic compound with the chemical formula Ca2. It is a colourless crystal or white powder and is obtained when calcium oxide is mixed, or "slaked" with water. It has many names including hydrated lime, builders lime, slack lime, cal, or...

that combine to precipitate calcium phosphate

Calcium phosphate

Calcium phosphate is the name given to a family of minerals containing calcium ions together with orthophosphates , metaphosphates or pyrophosphates and occasionally hydrogen or hydroxide ions ....

. The calcium phosphate particles entrap some impurities and absorb others, and then float to the top of the tank, where they are skimmed off.

After any remaining solids are filtered out, the clarified syrup is decolorized by filtration through a bed of activated carbon

Activated carbon

Activated carbon, also called activated charcoal, activated coal or carbo activatus, is a form of carbon that has been processed to make it extremely porous and thus to have a very large surface area available for adsorption or chemical reactions.The word activated in the name is sometimes replaced...

or, in more modern plants, ion-exchange resin.

Sugar house

The purified syrup is then concentrated to supersaturation and repeatedly crystallized under vacuum to produce white refined sugar. As in a sugar mill, the sugar crystals are separated from the mother liquor

Mother liquor

A mother liquor is the part of a solution that is left over after crystallization. It is encountered in chemical processes including sugar refining....

by centrifuging. To produce granulated sugar, in which the individual sugar grains do not clump together, sugar must be dried.

Sugar drying and storage

Drying is accomplished first by drying the sugar in a hot rotary dryer, and then by blowing cool air through it for several days in so-called conditioning silos. The finished product is stored in large concrete or steel silos. It is shipped in bulk, big bag

Big Bag

Big Bag was a live action television puppet program for preschoolers that was produced by The Jim Henson Company and aired from 1996 to 1998 on the Cartoon Network. There were also localized versions for Canal J in France and Yorkshire Television in the UK.-Plot:The principle Muppet character was...

s or 25 - 50 kg bags to industrial customers or packed in consumer-size packages to retailers.

The dried sugar must be handled with caution, as sugar dust explosions are possible. A sugar dust explosion which led to 13 fatalities was the 2008 Georgia sugar refinery explosion

2008 Georgia sugar refinery explosion

The 2008 Georgia sugar refinery explosion was an industrial disaster that occurred on February 7, 2008 in Port Wentworth, Georgia, United States. Thirteen people were killed and 42 injured when a dust explosion occurred at a sugar refinery owned by Imperial Sugar...

in Port Wentworth, GA.

Factory automation in sugar refineries

As in many other industries factory automation has been promoted heavily in sugar refineries in recent decades. The production process is generally controlled by a central process control system, which directly controls most of the machines and components. Only for certain special machines such as the centrifuges in the sugar house decentralized PLC

Programmable logic controller

A programmable logic controller or programmable controller is a digital computer used for automation of electromechanical processes, such as control of machinery on factory assembly lines, amusement rides, or light fixtures. PLCs are used in many industries and machines...

s are used for security reasons.

External links, Bibliography

Bibliography:

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