Factory Tour
Photograph taken by: National Airviews, Inc.

The juice derived form the mills goes through heaters that reach temperatures between 140º and 155º F. Then, it goes through the liming process, maintaining the pH at neutralize conditions.


The juice heating is carried out in three phases. The first one by vegetal vapor of 5.0 psi, reaching temperatures between 175º and 185º F; the second, by vapor 5.0 psi, reaching temperatures between 205º and 215ºF and, the last, with vapor of 10 psi to verify the juice automatically.


With the previous process, when released at an atmospheric pressure, the juice might suffer a slight evaporation in the flash tank, avoiding the flake to fluctuate or decant slowly due to the presence of bubbles trapped inside.


The next step is to feed the juice into clarifiers, slowly, to allow sludge concentration and extracting the same by gravity in a SRI clarifier and pumps in the Rapi door 444. In thefinalphase of this process, vibrating sieves with a 110 mesh are used for the eradication of bagasse and avoid it falling into the final product.


The head filters are indispensable for the process because without the same the sucrose loss in the filter cake would be significant.