Beet processing

Sugar production and refining involve the continual transfer of heat to and from the different juice flows, right from the first juice to the final molasses. Recovering more heat from your processes can help you use less energy and reduce your production costs.

Alfa Laval supplies advanced solutions for heating raw juice, limed juices and other fluids containing fibres, heating clarified juice, heating and cooling syrups, molasses and other high-viscosity liquids, evaporation and condensation solutions.

Raw juice, limed juices and other fluids containing fibres

By helping to recover more heat from your processes, Alfa Lava products help boost energy efficiency in your sugar plant. For fluids containing fibres, Alfa Laval WideGap plate heat exchangers are particularly effective.

Liquid, steam or low-pressure vapour can be used as heating media. Pan vapour or vapour from the last evaporation effect are traditionally considered as waste heat, but a WideGap heat exchanger makes use of this energy. This saves the more valuable heat sources for other duties, such producing electricity that can be fed to the national grid, or hot water for use in the local district heating network.

Clarified juice

An efficient solution is to use standard Alfa Laval plate heat exchangers to heat the clarified juice, exploiting vapour bleed-offs and condensate from the evaporators as heat sources.

This reduces energy consumption and maximizes the capacity of the evaporators.

Evaporation

In beet sugar mills, an AlfaVap plate evaporator can be installed as a booster to existing Robert evaporators. The low weight, compactness and versatility of the AlfaVap design enable you to mount it virtually anywhere to extend the evaporation capacity of an existing installation. Depending on capacity, AlfaVap units can also be used as a complete evaporation effect.

Syrups, molasses and other high-viscosity fluids

Alfa Laval standard plate heat exchangers provide efficient heating and cooling of high-viscosity liquids. We also supply rotary lobe pumps that are robust and durable even when handling abrasive media containing crystals.

Condensation

Ideal as a vacuum condenser, the AlfaCond plate condenser keeps the condensate separated from the cooling media. As legislation about wastewater treatment becomes increasingly stringent, this becomes an ideal option for installations where barometric condensers have been the traditional choice.