Today, almost no family can do without sugar on the table. It is well known to everyone and is part of a large number of dishes. From the point of view of chemistry, sugar can be called any substance that is included in the rather broad group of carbohydrates, soluble in water, having a sweet taste and having a low molecular weight. But in everyday life, this is usually called sucrose, produced mainly from beets or sugar cane.
How beet sugar is made
Beets are the most common and convenient raw material for sugar production. Because it quickly deteriorates, sugar factories are usually located close to fields. The beets are washed, cut into shavings and loaded into a so-called diffuser, which extracts sugar from the plant mass using hot water. The "diffusion juice" obtained in this way is usually 10-15% saturated with sucrose and has a dark color, since the organic substances that make up beets darken during oxidation. Waste from this process goes to livestock feed. Further, the diffusion juice is purified. It is placed in closed metal tanks and treated with milk of lime and sulfur dioxide. As a result, harmful impurities precipitate, which is removed using various filters and sedimentation tanks. Excess water is removed by evaporation. Further crystallization is carried out, for which vacuum devices are used. The size of which in some cases is comparable to the size of a two-story house. The resulting product contains sucrose crystals and molasses separated by centrifugation. The result is the receipt of solid sugar, subjected to additional drying. It can already be eaten.
How cane sugar is made
Typically, sugar is made from cane in tropical areas. And the process for making cane sugar is similar to extracting it from beets, but more laborious. Like beets, the cane is carefully chopped to make it easier to separate the juice. Then the resulting mass is carried out through a special press. As a rule, the cane is wrung out twice, and between procedures it is moistened with water to dilute the juice (maceration process). Further, the juice, as in the case of beet production, is purified and then clarified in a sump under pressure and high temperature (110-116 degrees).
The next step is evaporation. For this, special devices are used, in which heating is carried out by steam passing through a closed pipe system. The process ends in vacuum apparatuses. Then the resulting substance is passed through centrifuges, through the mesh nets of which the molasses is removed. Crystallized sugar remains inside. The molasses is brought to a boil again and subjected to crystallization and centrifugation. The effluent is crystallized again and used as livestock feed or fertilizer.
For refining, raw sugar is mixed with sugar syrup, which dissolves the remaining molasses. The mixture is passed through centrifuges and the resulting crystals are washed with steam. Then they are cleaned of impurities and filtered. Thereafter, the resulting product goes through the last step of evaporation, crystallization and centrifugation and then dried. After that, the cane sugar can be eaten.
