Technical Session - 3

Title:            Improving Cogeneration of Sugar Factory by Replacing Desuperheater with Superheated Steam Dryer
Authors:      Somchart Chantasiriwan
Abstract:     From energy viewpoint, the cogeneration system in sugar factories consists of four main processes: juice extraction, evaporation, steam generation, and turbo-generator. The juice extraction process converts sugar cane into extracted juice and bagasse. The juice is evaporated in the evaporation process, and bagasse is sent to the steam generation process. Combustion between bagasse and air in the steam generation unit produces highpressure steam, which is used to drive the turbo-genenerator. Steam exhausted from the turbo-genenerator is superheated, and must be desuperheated before being used to evaporate sugar juice in the evaporation process. The standard practice is to mix the superheated steam with cooling water in the desuperheater to produce saturated steam. In this paper, an investigation is made into the improvement of the cogeneration process by replacing desuperheater with superheated steam dryer. It is found that the improvement leads to increased steam flow rate, but less bagasse flow rate, which results in higher boiler and power plant efficiencies.

Keywords:  Cogeneration, Sugar Manufacturing, Bagasse Drying, Energy System, Modeling
Pages:        154-157

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