Sugar, Cane & Beets
FT-NIR Analysis of Sugar, Cane and Beets
Producing sugar from sugar cane or beet is a complex process requiring a tight quality control along the production chain to ensure optimized yield and quality. FT-NIR offers a fast and effective tool for controlling the critical QC parameters of raw materials, products and by-products in all production steps.
Application Areas
Near infrared spectroscopy provides accurate analysis results of multiple components within seconds. It is a non-destructive method without any sample preparation and does not require the use of any solvents or reagents. Operators can easily perform the real time measurements resulting in huge time and cost savings. FT-NIR can be implemented in the lab of a sugar mill, at-line in the production area or even on-line in order to control products and by-products.
The samples of incoming cane taken by a core sampler from the trucks are shredded for further analysis. Instead of pressing out the cane juice for payment analysis the cane can be directly analyzed with the CPS (Cane Processing System) which allows an analysis of 3 to 15 kg in one run.
The cane is automatically settled on a small conveyor belt and passes the NIR sensor head which can be installed for an on-line cane analysis directly in the mill as well. On cane the parameters Brix in juice, POL, fiber and moisture can be analyzed simultaneously and within a minute.
During the different steps of processing the cleared juice to raw sugar a lot of intermediate products are of interest to be analyzed quickly for process monitoring and control.
With a lab or at-line FT-NIR bench top analyzer all kind of samples of different juices, molasses, magma, seed, pan feeds and assecuites
can be analyzed on Brix, POL, ash, sucrose, glucose and fructose directly by milling a sample vial. If the samples are diluted the analysis is performed in transmission flow cell with temperature control which ensures higher accuracy.
In the refinery process first the raw sugar can be analyzed on many parameters: POL, moisture, reducing sugars, ash and color (ICUMSA). During processing again intermediate products like molasses and other can be checked for process optimization.
Final products like crystal sugar and syrups can be analyzed for quality control.
Fermentation of molasses and other sugar process by-products is a straight forward and widely used production process for bioethanol. With FT-NIR each of the steps can be controlled starting from the raw materials over the fermentation and distillation/rectification to the final bioethanol.
Especially for the fermentation and the distillation NIR in-line technology is an option which provides best opportunities for real time process control to optimize yield and processing time.
