Sugar

Sugar beet is sown in spring and harvested after about 180 days of sunlight. Post-harvest, beets are temporarily stored in field clamps before being transported to processing plants.

Beets arrive at the plant’s beet yard via lorries and are conveyed to washing stations. Slicer machines cut them into thin strips (cossettes), and diffusion towers use hot water to extract sugar, creating raw juice. Spent beet pulp is repurposed as animal feed.

Non-sugar components are removed using calcium carbonate and CO₂ during purification. Double filtration produces a pale-yellow clarified juice with ~16% sugar content. In evaporation units, water is removed in stages, concentrating the juice to ~70% sugar for the next phase.

For sugarcane, the shredded sticks pass through a series of three-roller mills (top, feed, and discharge rollers). Poorer juice from later mills is recycled, and hot water is applied in the final milling for maximum extraction efficiency.

Raw cane juice undergoes clarification in conical vessels where lime, phosphoric acid, and sulfur dioxide help settle impurities. Clean juice rises while sludge settles and is later filtered using rotary vacuum filters to remove residual solids.

The concentrated juice is boiled to form sugar crystals in a thick syrup (massecuite). This mixture cools in mash tuns before entering centrifuges where crystals are separated from molasses. Refining the crystals yields high-purity sugar, while molasses is used for animal feed, yeast, and alcohol production.

Finished sugar is dried, cooled, and stored in silos. It is then sieved and packaged in various forms to meet market demands, ensuring quality and consistency for consumers.

Our solutions empower sugar plants with:
✔️ Accurate flow, level, and pressure monitoring
✔️ Optimized energy use across processes
✔️ Minimal waste and improved extraction efficiency
✔️ Easy integration with existing systems