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Queensland

Increased cogeneration by sugar mills by modifying crystallisation pans


Sugar Research Institute

Increased cogeneration by sugar mills by modifying crystallisation pans

QSEIF Fact sheet

EnergyWise Queensland

With Queenslands sugar industry still recovering from record low sugar prices, the long-term survival and viability of the QSEIF funding: $108,000 industry hinges upon increasing the Modifications to sugar mill crystallisation productivity of sugar mills and diversifying their sources of income. One option is for pans reduce need for process steam sugar mills to achieve greater sales of by 8%. electricity, which is produced as a by Additional 4,500 MWh electricity product of steam generation for the mill. generated each crushing season. This enables the mill to fully exploit the value of bagasse, the fibrous residue of Emissions of greenhouse gases reduced sugar cane processing, as an energy 4,600 tonnes/year. source for steam and electricity production. Modifications can be retrofitted to any Burning bagasse in the sugar mill boiler crystallization pan. provides heat to produce high-grade Improved performance for pans with steam, from which some energy may be inadequate circulation. extracted for power generation in a turbine. Much of the heat is retained by steam Above left: Dr Darryn Rackemann measures the exhausted from the turbine, and this o gas pressure at the inlet pipe to the jigger lower-grade steam (at 120 C) provides process heat needed in the sugar mill. system underneath a crystallisation pan. Above right: SRI researcher Ross Broadfoot Modifying the factory to use the minimum amount of process steam, at the lowest observes sugar syrup boiling inside a possible steam temperature, allows more crystallisation pan through a viewport. electricity to be generated and sold.

Summary

Because bagasse is a renewable energy source, electricity is generated without significant net emissions of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. One major area of steam consumption in sugar mills is the crystallisation pan, the final stage in a process of evaporating water and growing sugar crystals from sugar syrup. Currently, crystallisation pans use exhaust steam from power-generating turbines. However, if crystallization pans could use low-grade recycled steam from elsewhere in the plant, more energy could be extracted from steam in the turbines. Operating crystallisation pans with low-temperature steam could enable more electricity to be produced and exported to the grid, with a typical sugar mill able to produce an additional 4,500 megawatt-hours of electricity during each crushing season. This would reduce the requirement for electricity to be produced by coal-fired generating plants, and avoid greenhouse gas emissions of about 4,600 tonnes per year.

Vapour Boiling level

Low-grade steam Uncondensed gases

Jigger tube

The SRI-developed jigger tube injects bubbles of gas into the bottom of the crystallization pan, carrying the viscous sugar syrup up through tubes in the steam heating jacket. Enhanced mixing and heat transfer allows lower-grade steam to be used in the crystallization pan.

The Sugar Research Institute (SRI), the leading research and development organisation servicing Australias sugar industry, proposed simple modifications that would allow crystallisation pans to operate on lower temperature steam while maintaining the yield and quality of sugar produced. Funding was provided through the Queensland Sustainable Energy Innovation Fund to enable SRI to prove the concept by modifying an existing crystallization pan. In a sugar mill, water is evaporated from the sugary juice squeezed from sugar cane. As the juice progresses through a series of evaporation stages, the sugar syrup becomes increasingly viscous and gooey. By the final crystallisation stage, the thick massecuite syrup is saturated with sugar. Sugar crystals grow as water is evaporated in the crystallisation pan. By the end of the crystallisation cycle, the massecuite is no longer a solution, but is a thick slurry loaded with sugar crystals. For water to evaporate from the sugar suspension in the crystallisation pan, heat must be transferred from a surrounding steam jacket. However, heat transfer and evaporation can only occur if the massecuite is well-mixed. With conventional crystallisers, vigorous boiling and rapid mixing of the massecuite is achieved by rapid heating with hot process steam (at

120oC) produced by the turbines in the sugar mill powerhouse. SRI researchers proposed to utilise low-temperature steam (at 110oC), produced as a byproduct of sugar mill evaporators. But this posed a major technical challenge: how to keep the thick sugar slurry boiling and moving through the steam heating jacket in the crystallisation pan? SRI developed an innovative modification that could be retrofitted to existing crystallisation pans. Low-grade steam remaining after passing through the crystalliser heating jacket (containing uncondensed steam and air) is injected as gas bubbles at the bottom of the pan. Rising bubbles carry the slurry up through the heating jacket, and create convection currents that mix the slurry exactly as normally occurs in crystalliser pans operated with hightemperature steam. During this QSEIF-funded project, crystallisation pans at Kalamia and Tully Sugar Mills were modified by fitting a circular jigger tube at the bottom of the pan. The installed jigger tube contains over one million laser-drilled holes. The tiny holes, only a fraction of a millimeter in diameter, produce small bubbles for maximum mixing effect, and prevent the sugar slurry flowing back into the jigger tube if the steam pressure should fall.

SRI undertook extensive measurements on the modified crystalliser pans, confirming enhanced heat transfer when the jigger tube system was operating. The crystalliser pan was able to use full steam flow until the very end of the cycle (the heavy up period), when the massecuite is most viscous. For a typical 600 tonne/day sugar factory, SRI estimates that operation of the crystalliser pan on low-grade steam would reduce the factorys overall consumption of process steam by about 7%, or 18 tonnes per hour. This steam saving could provide the energy requirements for an ethanol distillery, or displace electricity that would otherwise be generated by burning about 2,500 tonnes/year of coal. The SRI jigger system can to be retrofitted to any crystallisation pan (batch or continuous). Design and production of a jigger system, and installation within a 100 tonne capacity pan, would typically cost about $25,000. The greatest short-term benefits are likely to be achieved in pans that currently perform poorly due to inadequate circulation. The QSEIF project allowed the researchers to develop a commercialisation package (manual, marketing brochure and software to calculate design data and costs), and to begin commercialising the technology to sugar mills in Australia and overseas. Since the completion of the QSEIF project, jigger systems have been installed in ten batch and continuous crystallisation pans at five Australian Sugar Mills. Detailed technical results of the project will be presented at the 26th Congress of the International Society of Sugar Cane Technologists (ISSCT) in South Africa, in mid-2007. The jigger technology developed in the QSEIF project may have wider applicability beyond crystallisation pans. The Sugar Research Institute will be collaborating with QUT researchers on a new project to assess whether the jigger technology could also be applied to the final evaporator stage of sugar mills.

Contact details;
Mr Darryn Rackemann Sugar Research and Innovation Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities Queensland University of Technology Tel: (07) 3864 1353 Email: d.rackemann@qut.edu.au

For more information

> visit www.epa.qld.gov.au/sustainable_industries > email sustainable.industries@epa.qld.gov.au > call 3225 1999

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00058-0607 Revised April 2007

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