EMERGING TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS SUITABLE FOR VIABLE COTTAGE SUGAR PORDUCTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Abstract

Unlike the large scale (vacuum pan) industries, the economic viability of sugar production has not favoured the growth of cottage industries in most developing countries. Among other technological factors, problems such as in-efficient juice extraction and low crystallization rate of syrup were identified as major contributing factors for the inefficient and low overall performance of cottage sugar factories in many developing countries. Since the potential for sugar production is enormous in many of these countries, there was need to develop efficient technologies that could extract cane juice and also efficiently crystallize the concentrated Syrup. As a result, two new innovations: cane cutter/juice expeller to extract cane juice efficiently and combined air/water cool crystallizer to increase the crystallization rate were developed to replace the older technologies for cottage sugar production in Nigeria. The cottage level sugar production plant developed in the National Cereals Research Institute Badeggi, Nigeria was used to conduct the research work. The former set of machineries using rollers to extract sugarcane juice was used to process approximately 1,000 kg of sugarcane. Then, the new innovative technology was used for extracting juice from the same quantity of sugarcane(1000.5kg) .Also about 1,000 litres of massercuit were crystallized separately in the air cool and combined water/air cool crystallizers and the data obtained were analyzed. Results indicated that the juice extraction efficiency of the new technology (cane cutter/juice expeller) for extracting sugarcane juice was 98.5% while that of the older method was 56%. This represents an increase in juice extraction (recovery) of about 76% per kg of cane. Consequently, sugar recovery also improved abruptly from 5.5% to 8.5%. All these indices resulted to the viability of cottage sugar production as clearly indicated in the economic analysis. In addition, the baggasse temperature immediately after extracting the juice is as high as 65oc thus they were used as source of heat energy for firing the open pan boilers directly without additional energy and cost requirement for drying the baggasse.