Title: Energy saving in non-centrifugal sugar production

Abstract

Non-centrifugal sugar, commonly known as Jaggery is a traditional nutritional sweetener obtained by evaporation of sugarcane juice. The sequential unit operations in jaggery processing include cleaning, crushing, boiling, cooling, moulding, drying and packing. Out of these, much energy was utilized for boiling operation. The efficiencies of jaggery plant are very low due to the use of age-old constructed furnaces and non-adoption of advanced technologies (Sharon et al., 2013). The present study focuses on upgrading of jaggery plants through introduction of improved furnaces thereby saving and energy. Hence the study was conducted with an objective to compare performance evaluation of traditional single pan furnace, improved single pan furnace and three pan furnaces in terms of saving in fuel and time. The results revealed that there is saving of 26% of fuel in improved single pan system and 43% saving in three pan furnace for boiling 1 tonne of sugarcane juice compared to traditional single pan furnace system which are similar to the results obtained by Shiralkar et al. (2013). Also, there is saving of 13% in time in improved furnace system and 56% in 3 pan furnace system compared to traditional furnace system. Hence, the three-pan furnace system can be recommended for jaggery entrepreneurs which not only saves energy and time and increases production capacity by 100%.