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Abstract
Dynamic modelling of the sugar extraction process from beet was carried out, and the resulting first-order
partial differential equations written for three main constituents of the system (sugar, non-sugars and water)
were solved numerically by an implicit finite-difference algorithm. The model was able to predict the axial
concentration profiles and the process variables such as Brix, purity and the percentage of sugar and non-
sugar components diffused during the process at the exit streams. The results of the model were compared
with the experimental data obtained from an industrial plant and a close agreement was observed. Further-
more, in an industrial extraction plant, it is always desirable to maintain a constant and uniform flow of mate-
rials exiting the tower to ensure that the properties of the effluent streams are not changed. To achieve this, a
proportional integral (PI) controller was installed in the process to control the liquid level in the tower.
2. Mathematical modelling
The mathematical modelling will be presented in two
Figure 1. Qualitative flow diagram of a tower diffuser separate parts. First, tower modelling is carried out and its
with its level control system. governing equation will be discussed in detail. Afterwards,
the dynamic control of the juice level in the tower will be
moderately high temperature (70–758C) is required to investigated and the equations representing the controlling
ensure complete diffusion of soluble materials (Korgul scheme will be obtained.
1989; El-Belghiti et al. 2003). As the diffusion juice
passes down the tower, it is gradually enriched with solu- 2.1 Tower modelling
ble materials, and leaves the tower from the bottom while The process occurring in the tower diffuser is schemati-
the exhausted beet cossettes whose sugar and water con- cally shown in Figure 1. Several assumptions have been
tent are gradually depleted leave the tower from the top as made to develop this model as detailed below:
wet pulp. These wet pulps are further pressed to reduce
their sugar and water content. This water which is gener- The beet particles are assumed to be cylindrical in
ally known as the press water is recycled to the process as shape with a uniform concentration of their constitu-
part of the diffusion water to reduce the fresh water consump- ents (Van der Poel et al. 1998).
tion in the process. The extracted juice known sometimes as As the entire diffusion occurs in a narrow temperature
the raw juice will be further processed in subsequent stages range of 69–738C, the constant temperature assump-
such as purification, evaporation and crystallisation so that tion could be justified. Thus, temperature-dependent
its impurities are removed. properties, such as diffusion coefficients, remain nearly
There are two indexes used in the sugar industry by constant throughout the tower.
which the quality of the extracted juice can be determined. Constant pH value is assumed throughout the process.
These indexes are Brix and purity. Brix is, by definition, The beet cossettes consist of only four main compo-
the amount of sugar and non-sugar components in the efflu- nents including sugar, non-sugar compounds, water and
ent juice which is sometimes known as total dry soluble marc. The latter is the non-diffusing component remain-
substance. Purity is the ratio of sugar to sugar plus non- ing in the solid phase only (El-Belghiti et al. 2005).
sugar components and is sometimes called quotient. Brix As the external mass transfer coefficient is two orders
and purity are the most commonly used properties for deter- of magnitude larger than the internal mass transfer
mining the quality of the effluent raw juice and are defined coefficient, it can be assumed that the mass transfer
by the following relationships (McCabe et al. 2006): resistance in the solid phase, which is the reciprocal
of mass transfer coefficient, is dominant during the
Bx ¼ S þ NS (1) material transport.
S The material transport with axial diffusion was
Q¼ (2) neglected compared with that of the bulk flow.
S þ NS
From the descriptions given above, it can be concluded Based on the above assumptions, the material balance
that the more sugar is extracted from the beet cossettes, the over the differential volume shown in Figure 2 could be
more will be the overall efficiency of the above-mentioned written as:
Dynamic modelling of the sugar extraction process from sugar beet N. Mostoufi et al. 51
Dividing equation 3 by Adze and simplifying yields: Equation 9 should be solved subject to the following
initial and boundary conditions:
dCL;i dCL;i
þa bðC CL;i Þ þ k1 CL;i ¼ 0 (4)
dt dz B:C: : Ci; 0 ¼ 0 (12)
(i ¼ S, NS, W)
where: I:C: : C0; n ¼ 0 (13)
V
a¼ (5)
Ae
and 2.2 Juice level control
b ¼ kc a (6) Sugar diffusion plants have a high rate of water consump-
tion which is used as the diffusion water. As was shown
The initial and boundary conditions for equation 4 are previously in Figure 1, all the water extracted from the
as follows: wet pulp, known as press water, is recycled to the process.
In order to know how much fresh water is needed for the
B:C: : at z ¼ 0 CL;i ¼ 0 (7) diffusion, in addition to the press water, it is necessary to
have a control on the juice level in the tower. In this way
I:C: : at t ¼ 0 CL;i ¼ 0 (8) the fresh water flow can be directly controlled with varia-
tions in the juice level. This can be achieved by a
dynamic material balance over the tower diffuser. It would
The first-order partial differential equation (equation 4)
be evident from Figure 1 that the press water stream once
was discretised by an implicit finite-difference method
exits the tower as the wet pulp water content and returns
(Constantinides and Mostoufi 1999) which is not sensitive
to the tower again as the press water. Therefore it is elimi-
to the step size. Explicit methods for first-order partial dif-
nated from the mass balance and the equation in the
ferential equations are not appropriate because the range
dynamic mode would be:
of stability is quite narrow in this approach. The resulting
difference equation is:
dL m Beet ð1 DÞ þ m Fresh water m Pulp
¼ (14)
Ci;nþ1 ¼ cCi;n xCiþ1;nþ1 þ xCi1;nþ1 þ bC t (9) dt qJuice A e
m Juice
D¼ (15)
m Beet
Figure 3. Summary of resistances encountered during mass transfer from beet tissue to the diffusion liquid.
Z t
Kc 3.2 Reaction rate constant
OPðtÞ ¼ Kc EðtÞ þ EðtÞ dt (16)
tI 0 Sugar diffusion is carried out in acidic conditions in which
sucrose can be hydrolysed to produce invert sugars, which
where OP, Kc, E and tI are the deviation variables for the are classified as non-sugar components. The hydrolysis
controller output, proportional constant, error and the inte- reaction which is also known as sugar inversion is given
gral time, respectively. as:
Sucrose þ H2 O ) Glucose þ Fructose (19)
3. Properties and correlations
Physical properties of the materials needed for modelling
were evaluated from proper correlations described in this The above reaction has first-order kinetics and is depen-
section. These properties include mass transfer coefficients dent on temperature and pH according to the following
and reaction rate constant. rate expression (Bubnik et al. 1995; Van der Poel et al.
1998):
5670
3.1 Mass transfer coefficients log k1 ¼ 16:91 pH (20)
T
In the case of mass transfer from the solid phase into the
liquid phase, two types of coefficients could be presented,
i.e. internal and external mass transfer coefficients. These The values for k1 in s–1 at different temperatures and
two coefficients can be evaluated from equations 17 and pH values are depicted in Table 1. According to this table,
18, respectively. The resistances to mass transfer are the rate constant is increased with an increase in tempera-
shown schematically in Figure 3. ture and is decreased with an increase in pH. Nevertheless,
Internal mass transfer coefficient (Treybal 2000; Cha- its effect on the entire process could be simply ignored
lermchat et al. 2004; McCabe et al. 2006) is given by the since the whole process is mass transfer controlled. The
equation
Table 1. Variation of the rate constant of Equation 20
6De with temperature and pH value
kc ¼ (17)
Dp
k ( 10–6 s–1)
External mass transfer coefficient (Van der Poel et al. T (8C) pH ¼ 4 pH ¼ 4.5 pH ¼ 5
1998; Bird et al. 2002) is given by the equation 65 2.3 0.7 0.23
70 4 1.3 0.4
75 7 2.2 0.7
Sh ¼ ð1:09=eÞðReScÞ1=3 (18)
Dynamic modelling of the sugar extraction process from sugar beet N. Mostoufi et al. 53
Table 2. Typical composition of beet Table 4. Comparison between the model output
and the experimental data when 100 kg beet
Composition Weight percent (wet basis) entered the tower
Sugar 17
Non-sugar 2.02 Simulated Actual Error
Water 76.48 Parameter value plant data (%)
Marc 4.5 Juice Brix 18.91 17.27 9
Juice purity 89.4 86.4 3
Juice sugar content 16.91 16.66 1.5
beet diffusion is normally carried out at a pH between 4 (kg/100 kg beet)
and 5.5. However, the choice of an appropriate pH value Juice non-sugar 2.0 1.95 2
depends on the following factors: content (kg/100 kg
beet)
The pH value should be low enough to prevent Juice water content 95.74 101.74 5
(kg/100 kg beet)
microbiological developments in the extracted juice Pulp sugar content 0.21 0.27 22
The pH value should be high enough to prevent (kg/100 kg beet)
sucrose hydrolysis and minimise the corrosion in the Pulp non-sugar 0.08 0.07 14
tower. content (kg/100 kg
beet)
According to the literature (El-Belghiti et al. 2005), the
appropriate pH value for diffusion is 4.5. Therefore, this
value has been used in the present work. the profiles change with variations in mass transfer coeffi-
cients. For the beet given in Table 1, the values of kc from
equations 17 and 18 were found to be 1.4 10–7 for
4. Results and discussion internal and 4.5 10–5 for external mass transfer coeffi-
The model equations were solved numerically for an cients, respectively, and this justifies the assumption made
industrial tower diffuser and the results were compared for modelling. As opposed to the mass transfer coeffi-
with the corresponding plant data. A typical composition cients, the effect of sucrose consumption due to reaction
of the beet is given in Table 2 from which the parameter is quite negligible in the system and it can simply be
C* can readily be evaluated. Input data and operating con- ignored (Van der Poel et al. 1998; El-Belghiti et al.
ditions for the industrial tower diffuser are also given in 2005). Figure 5 shows the sucrose concentration profiles
Table 3. In the industrial vertical tower diffuser, sampling once assuming the presence of reaction and once with
could only be done at the bottom of the tower where the neglecting it. As seen in Figure 5, the two curves have
juice leaves the equipment. Therefore, sugar and non- completely coincided. This can be justified by equation 11
sugar components could be measured only at the bottom in which the value of b is much greater than k1 (b >>
of the tower. Table 4 provides a comparison between the k1). Therefore, it can be concluded that the sucrose reac-
modelling results and actual plant data, where a satisfac- tion has no considerable effect on the concentration pro-
tory agreement has been obtained. files.
Numerous values for sucrose diffusion coefficients have
been presented in the literature (Van der Poel et al. 1998;
Jemai and Vorobiev 2003; El-Belghiti et al. 2005). The
concentration profiles for sucrose are very sensitive to
these values as shown in Figure 4. This figure shows how
Figure 6. Concentration profiles versus time at z ¼ 3 m. Figure 8. Concentration profiles versus time at z ¼ 15 m.
Dynamic modelling of the sugar extraction process from sugar beet N. Mostoufi et al. 55