Sugar cane juice clarification by carbonation - preliminary tests

Sugar cane juice clarification by carbonation - preliminary tests. The clarification of sugar cane juice is a major unit operation in producing white sugar. In Brazil, the traditional method for this process is sulfitation, a technique that uses gaseous SO(2) and lime. However, this process has shown sonic restrictions in its use due to environmental and food safety standards. An alternative process is carbonation, which improves sugar quality and reduces environmental damage commonly related to the former process. For optimization and process design purposes, the study of the variables is a prior step. In this work, the clarification of sugar cane juice was carried out using carbon dioxide and the pH effect on parameter of greatest relevance in clarified juice was investigated in the range from 5 to 9, highlighting especially the content of sucrose, reducing sugars, starch, phosphate, turbidity, color ICUMSA, %CaO and ash. Results show that there was no degradation of sucrose, and clarification at pH 9 removes the starch, phosphate and turbidity and increases the degradation of reducing sugars. In the experimental conditions, carbonation with pH lower than 7 were not effective in removing impurities from sugar cane juice.