In the New Cane Sugar Refinery that has been recently proposed by Applexion at the 1998 S.I.T. meeting, the raw sugar remelt is simply purified by microfiltration, decolorized and softened by ion-exchange resins, and finally crystallized in 3 strikes that provide white sugar and low purity mother liquor. This New Refining Process is particularly attractive by eliminating affination of raw sugar and the necessary recovery house. The sucrose left in the low purity mother liquor can be recovered using two different processes : 1. the either conventional crystallization in another 3 steps, producing final molasses and low purity sugars which are, after remelt, recycled back to the refinery process. 2. or the chromatographic separation, generating a high sucrose purity extract recycled back to the process and a raffinate giving after concentration the final molasses. The objective of the present article is now to compare the performances of these two technologies in terms of sugar quality and yield, as well as capital and operating costs, for a 1 000 t/day cane sugar refinery.
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