Talking about Crushing Units for sweet sorghum (2 posts)

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  • Denis Picco said 3 years, 8 months ago:

    04th March, 2011
    Dear all,
    an important part of a bioethanol plant is the crushing unit for the juice extraction from the raw material. Talking about sweet sorghum biomass, these crushing units are the same which are used for the sugarcane juice extraction.
    In India we had the possibility to visit both DCU – decentralised crushing units - not applicable in a European model and an example of industrial crushing unit, that is able to work 900 t/day (24/24 hours); this last crushing unit is applied in a 30,000 litres per year bioethanol plant (TATA Chemicals plant in Nanded - India).
    This industrial crushing unit is composed by 4 mills – four units of squeezing (during the 3rd pressure hot water (125 m3/day) at a temperature around 65 °C is added to increase the juice extraction efficiency).

    It is important to understand what is the total juice extraction efficiency and the mass balance of this section. I think that around the world there are different experiences in sugar extraction from sweet sorghum and of course from sugarcane. So we need several data about the crushing units performances:
    • juice extraction efficiency
    • sugars extraction efficiency
    • sweet sorghum bagasse water content

    I kindly ask to the other partners of the project to implement with concrete data this topic, in order to try do have a more accurate model.

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  • Denis Picco said 3 years, 7 months ago:

    06th April 2011,
    dear all,
    after one month no one have report his ideas and experiences in these topic. The sugar extraction efficiency is one of the most important step in our model.
    The experiences evaluated during our travels in India and Peru in the sugar cane chain (and also in the sweet sorghum chain) reported a very good level of sugar extraction, with a maximum of 95%.
    The final water content of the bagasse was about 50%.
    If you have some information to share with the Community about your experiences in the crushing units use with sweet sorghum or sugar cane, please, you are welcome!

    Denis

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