Abstract
The evaporation process, boiler, and turbine are the main components of the cogeneration system of the sugar factory. In the conventional process, the evaporator requires extracted steam from the turbine, and bled vapor from the evaporator is supplied to the juice heater and the pan stage. The evaporation process may be modified by using extracted steam for the heating duty in the pan stage. This paper is aimed at the investigation of the effects of this process modification. Mathematical models of the conventional and modified processes were developed for this purpose. It was found that, under the conditions that the total evaporator area is 13,000 m2, and the inlet juice flow rate is 125 kg/s, the optimum modified evaporation process requires extracted steam at a pressure of 157.0 kPa. Under the condition that the fuel consumption rate is 21 kg/s, the cogeneration system that uses the optimum modified evaporation process yields 2.3% more power output than the cogeneration system that uses a non-optimum conventional cogeneration process. Furthermore, sugar inversion loss of the optimum modified process is found to be 63% lower than that of the non-optimum conventional process.
Highlights
The evaporation process, boiler, and steam turbine are the main components of the cogeneration system in the sugar industry
This paper is intended to demonstrate that the modified evaporation process requires extracted steam at a lower pressure than the conventional evaporation process, which leads to the enhanced performance of the modified evaporation process compared with the conventional process
The comparison between the cogeneration system that used the conventional evaporation process and the cogeneration system that used the modified evaporation process was investigated in this paper
Summary
The evaporation process, boiler, and steam turbine are the main components of the cogeneration system in the sugar industry. It is interesting to note that vapor is usually bled from the first effect of the multiple-effect evaporator in order to be used for heating duty in the pan stage This requirement imposes an additional constraint on the lower limit of the extracted steam pressure. Reduced extracted steam pressure results in higher energy efficiency and lower sucrose inversion loss due to decreased temperature profile across the effects of the evaporator [17]. The performance of the conventional process, in which vapor bled from the multiple-effect evaporator is used for the pan stage, is compared with that of a modified sugar juice evaporation process, which uses extracted steam instead of bled vapor for heating duty in the pan stage.
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