Raw sugar - Import export

DSEC has dedicated special attention to the design of sugar refinery EPC construction with particular emphasis on energetic efficiency and white sugar quality. A considerable portion of the sugar market is located in areas where neither beet nor cane can be cultivated. Such markets can be fed by large bulk ships with raw cane sugar that needs to be further refined before being commercialized. As the quality of the raw sugar available on the international market varies considerably depending on its origin, DSEC has developed alternative concepts to adapt the refinery design to the feedstock to be processed. The selected alternative for a refined sugar production will be defined after contemplating the necessity of a raw sugar affination (washing) step before the mandatory re-melting operation. Different purification or possibly decoloration technologies will also be analyzed by DSEC so as to optimize capital expenditures in function of feedstock and finished products as well as of the local environment.

DSEC's commitment on the construction of Bioethanol plants is based on a very specialized technical knowledge of the Ethanol production processes; in this article you will find a more detailed understanding about the Upstream process. In Europe and the US, the existing traditional 1" generation bioethanol plants typically process cereals (maize/corn, wheat, rye, ...) and other starch or sugar containing raw materials (e.g. sugar beet). The raw material initially undergoes crushing (milling for cereals) to reduce the particle size distribution to such a degree that the enzymes enter in contact with the starch molecules in the subsequent steps. During liquefaction with alpha-amylase, starch is dismantled into low molecular sugar units, the so-called dextrines. In the next process step, saccharification, these dextrines are further dismantled into fermentable sugars by means of gluco-amylase. In the fermentation process, these fermentable sugars are partly aerobically transformed, but mainly anaerobically by Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) into biomass and ethanol; sugar containing raw material as e.g. sugar cane can be directly fed into fermentation after crushing. Upstream process groups: - Storage - Cleaning - Milling / Crushing - Mashing - Liquefaction - Saccharification - Fermentation (batch or continuous)