Sugar refinery
A sugar refinery is a refinery which processes raw sugar into white refined sugar or that processes sugar beet to refined sugar. Many cane sugar mills produce raw sugar, sugar that still contains molasses, giving it more colour than the white sugar, consumed in households and used as an ingredient in soft drinks and foods. While cane sugar does not need refining to be palatable, sugar from sugar beet is always refined to remove the strong always unwanted, taste of beets from it; the refined sugar produced is more than 99 percent pure sucrose. Whereas many sugar mills only operate during a limited time of the year during the cane harvesting period, many cane sugar refineries work the whole year round. Sugar beet refineries tend to have shorter periods when they process beet but may store intermediate product and process that in the off-season. Raw sugar is either processed into white refined sugar in local refineries, sold to the local industry and consumers, or it is exported and refined in the country of destination.
Sugar refineries are located in heavy sugar-consuming regions such as North America and Japan. Since the 1990s many state-of-the art sugar refineries have been built in the Middle East and North Africa region, e.g. in Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. The world´s largest sugar refinery company is American Sugar Refining with facilities in North America and Europe; the raw sugar is stored in large warehouses and transported into the sugar refinery by means of transport belts. In the traditional refining process, the raw sugar is first mixed with heavy syrup and centrifuged to wash away the outer coating of the raw sugar crystals, less pure than the crystal interior. Many sugar refineries today buy high pol sugar and can do without the affination process; the remaining sugar is dissolved to make a syrup, clarified by the addition of phosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide that combine to precipitate calcium phosphate. The calcium phosphate particles entrap some impurities and absorb others, float to the top of the tank, where they are skimmed off.
After any remaining solids are filtered out, the clarified syrup is decolorized by filtration through the use of bone char, made from the bones of cattle, a bed of activated carbon or, in more modern plants, ion-exchange resin. The purified syrup is concentrated to supersaturation and crystallized under vacuum to produce white refined sugar; as in a sugar mill, the sugar crystals are separated from the mother liquor by centrifuging. To produce granulated sugar, in which the individual sugar grains do not clump together, sugar must be dried. Drying is accomplished first by drying the sugar in a hot rotary dryer, by blowing cool air through Centrifugal Blower/fan it for several days in so-called conditioning silos; the finished product is stored in large concrete or steel silos. It is shipped in bulk, big bags or 25 – 50 kg bags to industrial customers or packed in consumer-size packages to retailers; the dried sugar must be handled with caution, as sugar dust explosions are possible. For example, a sugar dust explosion which led to 13 fatalities was the 2008 Georgia sugar refinery explosion in Port Wentworth, GA.
Molasses Bagasse Press Mud As in many other industries factory automation has been promoted in sugar refineries in recent decades. The production process is controlled by a central process control system, which directly controls most of the machines and components. Only for certain special machines such as the centrifuges in the sugar house decentralized PLCs are used for security reasons. Onses, Richard. Continuous dissolution process for sugar, in Alimentacion Equipos y Tecnologio, Editorial Alcion, May 1987. Barcelona. Sugar related online glossary. Sugar refining. Centrifugal control and the quality of white sugar by Barbara Rogé et. al. retrieved on 27 June, 2010
Potassium
Potassium is a chemical element with symbol K and atomic number 19. It was first isolated from the ashes of plants, from which its name derives. In the periodic table, potassium is one of the alkali metals. All of the alkali metals have a single valence electron in the outer electron shell, removed to create an ion with a positive charge – a cation, which combines with anions to form salts. Potassium in nature occurs only in ionic salts. Elemental potassium is a soft silvery-white alkali metal that oxidizes in air and reacts vigorously with water, generating sufficient heat to ignite hydrogen emitted in the reaction, burning with a lilac-colored flame, it is found dissolved in sea water, is part of many minerals. Potassium is chemically similar to sodium, the previous element in group 1 of the periodic table, they have a similar first ionization energy, which allows for each atom to give up its sole outer electron. That they are different elements that combine with the same anions to make similar salts was suspected in 1702, was proven in 1807 using electrolysis.
Occurring potassium is composed of three isotopes, of which 40K is radioactive. Traces of 40K are found in all potassium, it is the most common radioisotope in the human body. Potassium ions are vital for the functioning of all living cells; the transfer of potassium ions across nerve cell membranes is necessary for normal nerve transmission. Fresh fruits and vegetables are good dietary sources of potassium; the body responds to the influx of dietary potassium, which raises serum potassium levels, with a shift of potassium from outside to inside cells and an increase in potassium excretion by the kidneys. Most industrial applications of potassium exploit the high solubility in water of potassium compounds, such as potassium soaps. Heavy crop production depletes the soil of potassium, this can be remedied with agricultural fertilizers containing potassium, accounting for 95% of global potassium chemical production; the English name for the element potassium comes from the word "potash", which refers to an early method of extracting various potassium salts: placing in a pot the ash of burnt wood or tree leaves, adding water and evaporating the solution.
When Humphry Davy first isolated the pure element using electrolysis in 1807, he named it potassium, which he derived from the word potash. The symbol "K" stems from kali, itself from the root word alkali, which in turn comes from Arabic: القَلْيَه al-qalyah "plant ashes". In 1797, the German chemist Martin Klaproth discovered "potash" in the minerals leucite and lepidolite, realized that "potash" was not a product of plant growth but contained a new element, which he proposed to call kali. In 1807, Humphry Davy produced the element via electrolysis: in 1809, Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert proposed the name Kalium for Davy's "potassium". In 1814, the Swedish chemist Berzelius advocated the name kalium for potassium, with the chemical symbol "K"; the English and French speaking countries adopted Davy and Gay-Lussac/Thénard's name Potassium, while the Germanic countries adopted Gilbert/Klaproth's name Kalium. The "Gold Book" of the International Union of Physical and Applied Chemistry has designated the official chemical symbol as K.
Potassium is the second least dense metal after lithium. It is a soft solid with a low melting point, can be cut with a knife. Freshly cut potassium is silvery in appearance, but it begins to tarnish toward gray on exposure to air. In a flame test and its compounds emit a lilac color with a peak emission wavelength of 766.5 nanometers. Neutral potassium atoms have 19 electrons, one more than the stable configuration of the noble gas argon; because of this and its low first ionization energy of 418.8 kJ/mol, the potassium atom is much more to lose the last electron and acquire a positive charge than to gain one and acquire a negative charge. This process requires so little energy that potassium is oxidized by atmospheric oxygen. In contrast, the second ionization energy is high, because removal of two electrons breaks the stable noble gas electronic configuration. Potassium therefore does not form compounds with the oxidation state of higher. Potassium is an active metal that reacts violently with oxygen in water and air.
With oxygen it forms potassium peroxide, with water potassium forms potassium hydroxide. The reaction of potassium with water is dangerous because of its violent exothermic character and the production of hydrogen gas. Hydrogen reacts again with atmospheric oxygen, producing water, which reacts with the remaining potassium; this reaction requires only traces of water. Because of the sensitivity of potassium to water and air, reactions with other elements are possible only in an inert atmosphere such as argon gas using air-free techniques. Potassium does not react with most hydrocarbons such as mineral kerosene, it dissolves in liquid ammonia, up to 480 g per 1000 g of ammonia at 0 °C. Depending on the concentration, the ammonia solutions are blue to yellow, their electrical conductivity is similar to that of liquid metals. In a pure solution, potassium reacts with ammonia to form KNH2, but this reaction is accelerated by minute amounts of transition metal s
Allan Pinkerton
Allan J. Pinkerton was a Scottish-American detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Allan Pinkerton was born in Gorbals, Scotland, to William Pinkerton and his wife, Isobel McQueen, on August 25, 1819, he left school at the age of 10 after his father's death. Pinkerton read voraciously and was self-educated. A cooper by trade, Pinkerton was active in the Scottish Chartist movement as a young man, he secretly married Joan Carfrae from Duddingston a singer, in Glasgow on 13 March 1842. Pinkerton emigrated to the United States in 1842. In 1843 Pinkerton heard of Dundee Township, fifty miles northwest of Chicago on the Fox River, he built a cabin and started a cooperage, sending for his wife in Chicago when their cabin was complete. As early as 1844, Pinkerton worked for the Chicago abolitionist leaders, his Dundee home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Pinkerton first got interested in criminal detective work while wandering through the wooded groves around Dundee, looking for trees to make barrel staves, when he came across a band of counterfeiters—who may have been affiliated with the notorious Banditti of the Prairie.
After observing their movements for some time he informed the local sheriff. This led to Pinkerton being appointed, in 1849, as the first police detective in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois. In 1850, he partnered with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in forming the North-Western Police Agency, which became Pinkerton & Co, Pinkerton National Detective Agency, still in existence today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, a subsidiary of Securitas AB. Pinkerton's business insignia was a wide open eye with the caption "We never sleep." As the US expanded in territory, rail transport increased. Pinkerton's agency solved a series of train robberies during the 1850s, first bringing Pinkerton into contact with George McClellan Chief Engineer and Vice President of the Illinois Central Railroad, Abraham Lincoln, the company's lawyer. In 1859, he attended the secret meetings held by John Brown and Frederick Douglass in Chicago along with abolitionists John Jones and Henry O. Wagoner. At those meetings, Jones and Pinkerton helped purchase clothes and supplies for Brown.
Jones' wife, guessed that the supplies included the suit Brown was hanged in after the failure of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in November 1859. When the Civil War began, Pinkerton served as head of the Union Intelligence Service during the first two years, heading off an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland while guarding Abraham Lincoln on his way to Washington, D. C. as well as identifying troop numbers in military campaigns. His agents worked undercover as Confederate soldiers and sympathizers to gather military intelligence. Pinkerton himself served on several undercover missions as a confederate soldier using the alias Major E. J. Allen, he worked across the Deep South in the summer of 1861, focusing on fortifications and Confederate plans. He was found out in Memphis and escaped with his life; this counterintelligence work done by Pinkerton and his agents is comparable to the work done by today's U. S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agents in which Pinkerton's agency is considered an early predecessor.
He was succeeded as Intelligence Service chief by Lafayette Baker. S. Secret Service, his work led to the establishment of the Federal secret service. Following Pinkerton's service with the Union Army, he continued his pursuit of train robbers, including the Reno Gang, he was hired by the railroad express companies to track outlaw Jesse James, but after Pinkerton failed to capture him, the railroad withdrew their financial support and Pinkerton continued to track James at his own expense. After James captured and killed one of Pinkerton's undercover agents, he abandoned the chase; some consider this failure Pinkerton's biggest defeat. He opposed labor unions. In 1872, the Spanish Government hired Pinkerton to help suppress a revolution in Cuba which intended to end slavery and give citizens the right to vote. If Pinkerton knew this it directly contradicts statements in his 1883 book The Spy of the Rebellion, where he professes to be an ardent abolitionist and hater of slavery; the Spanish government abolished slavery in 1880 and a Royal Decree abolished the last vestiges of it in 1886.
Allan Pinkerton died in Chicago on July 1, 1884. It is said that Pinkerton slipped on the pavement and bit his tongue, resulting in gangrene. Contemporary reports give conflicting causes, such as that he succumbed to a stroke or to malaria, which he had contracted during a trip to the Southern United States. At the time of his death, he was working on a system to centralize all criminal identification records, a database now maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Pinkerton was a lifelong atheist. Pinkerton is buried in Chicago, he is a member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame. After his death, the agency continued to operate and soon became a major force against the labor movement developing in the US and Canada; this effort changed the image of the Pinkertons for years. They were involved in numerous activities against labor during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including: The Homestead Strike, the direct impetus for the federal Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893, prohibiting the federal government from hiring its detectives The Pullman Strike The Wild Bunch Gang The Ludlow Massacre The La Follette Committee Despite his agency's lat
Sugarcane
Sugarcane, or sugar cane, are several species of tall perennial true grasses of the genus Saccharum, tribe Andropogoneae, native to the warm temperate to tropical regions of South, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, used for sugar production. It has stout, fibrous stalks that are rich in the sugar sucrose, which accumulates in the stalk internodes; the plant is two to six metres tall. All sugar cane species can interbreed and the major commercial cultivars are complex hybrids. Sugarcane belongs to the grass family Poaceae, an economically important seed plant family that includes maize, wheat and sorghum, many forage crops. Sucrose and purified in specialized mill factories, is used as raw material in the food industry or is fermented to produce ethanol. Sugarcane is the world's largest crop by production quantity, with 1.9 billion tonnes produced in 2016, Brazil accounting for 41% of the world total. In 2012, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated it was cultivated on about 26 million hectares, in more than 90 countries.
The global demand for sugar is the primary driver of sugarcane agriculture. Cane accounts for 79% of sugar produced. Sugarcane predominantly grows in the subtropical regions. Other than sugar, products derived from sugarcane include falernum, rum, cachaça, ethanol. In some regions, people use sugarcane reeds to make pens, mats and thatch; the young, unexpanded inflorescence of Saccharum edule is eaten raw, steamed, or toasted, prepared in various ways in Southeast Asia, including Fiji and certain island communities of Indonesia. Sugarcane was an ancient crop of the Papuan people, it was introduced to Polynesia, Island Melanesia, Madagascar in prehistoric times via Austronesian sailors. It was introduced to southern China and India by Austronesian traders at around 1200 to 1000 BC; the Persians, followed by the Greeks, encountered the famous "reeds that produce honey without bees" in India between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. They adopted and spread sugarcane agriculture. Merchants began to trade in sugar from India, considered a luxury and an expensive spice.
In the 18th century AD, sugarcane plantations began in Caribbean, South American, Indian Ocean and Pacific island nations and the need for laborers became a major driver of large human migrations, both the voluntary in indentured servants. And the involuntary migrations, in the form of slave labor. Sugarcane is a tropical, perennial grass that forms lateral shoots at the base to produce multiple stems three to four m high and about 5 cm in diameter; the stems grow into cane stalk. A mature stalk is composed of 11–16% fiber, 12–16% soluble sugars, 2–3% nonsugars, 63–73% water. A sugarcane crop is sensitive to the climate, soil type, fertilizers, disease control and the harvest period; the average yield of cane stalk is 60–70 tonnes per hectare per year. However, this figure can vary between 30 and 180 tonnes per hectare depending on knowledge and crop management approach used in sugarcane cultivation. Sugarcane is a cash crop, but it is used as livestock fodder. There are two centers of domestication for sugarcane: one for Saccharum officinarum by Papuans in New Guinea and another for Saccharum sinense by Austronesians in Taiwan and southern China.
Papuans and Austronesians primarily used sugarcane as food for domesticated pigs. The spread of both S. officinarum and S. sinense is linked to the migrations of the Austronesian peoples. Saccharum barberi was only cultivated in India after the introduction of S. officinarum. Saccharum officinarum was first domesticated in New Guinea and the islands east of the Wallace Line by Papuans, where it is the modern center of diversity. Beginning at around 6,000 BP they were selectively bred from the native Saccharum robustum. From New Guinea it spread westwards to Island Southeast Asia after contact with Austronesians, where it hybridized with Saccharum spontaneum; the second domestication center is mainland southern China and Taiwan where S. sinense was a primary cultigen of the Austronesian peoples. Words for sugarcane exist in the Proto-Austronesian languages in Taiwan, reconstructed as *təbuS or **CebuS, which became *tebuh in Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, it was one of the original major crops of the Austronesian peoples from at least 5,500 BP.
Introduction of the sweeter S. officinarum may have replaced it throughout its cultivated range in Island Southeast Asia. From Island Southeast Asia, S. officinarum was spread eastward into Polynesia and Micronesia by Austronesian voyagers as a canoe plant by around 3,500 BP. It was spread westward and northward by around 3,000 BP to China and India by Austronesian traders, where it further hybridized with Saccharum sinense and Saccharum barberi. From there it spread further into the Mediterranean; the earliest known production of crystalline sugar began in northern India. The exact date of the first cane sugar production is unclear; the earliest evidence of sugar production comes from ancient Pali texts. Around the 8th century and Arab traders introduced sugar from medieval India to the other parts of the Abbasid Caliphate in the Mediterranean, Egypt, North Africa, Andalusia. By the 10th century, sources state, it was among the early crops brought to the Americas by the Spanish Andalu
Sugar beet
A sugar beet is a plant whose root contains a high concentration of sucrose and, grown commercially for sugar production. In plant breeding it is known as the Altissima cultivar group of the common beet. Together with other beet cultivars, such as beetroot and chard, it belongs to the subspecies Beta vulgaris subsp. Vulgaris, its closest wild relative is the sea beet. In 2013, France, the United States and Turkey were the world's five largest sugar beet producers. In 2010–2011, North America and Europe did not produce enough sugar from sugar beets to meet overall demand for sugar and were all net importers of sugar; the US harvested 1,004,600 acres of sugar beets in 2008. In 2009, sugar beets accounted for 20% of the world's sugar production; the sugar beet has a conical, fleshy root with a flat crown. The plant consists of a rosette of leaves. Sugar is formed by photosynthesis in the leaves and is stored in the root; the root of the beet contains 75% water, about 20% sugar, 5% pulp. The exact sugar content can vary between 12% and 21% sugar, depending on the cultivar and growing conditions.
Sugar is the primary value of sugar beet as a cash crop. The pulp, insoluble in water and composed of cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin, is used in animal feed; the byproducts of the sugar beet crop, such as pulp and molasses, add another 10% to the value of the harvest. Sugar beets grow in the temperate zone, in contrast to sugarcane, which grows in the tropical and subtropical zones; the average weight of sugar beet ranges between 1 kg. Sugar beet foliage grows to a height of about 35 cm; the leaves are numerous and broad and grow in a tuft from the crown of the beet, level with or just above the ground surface. Modern sugar beets date back to mid-18th century Silesia where the king of Prussia subsidised experiments aimed at processes for sugar extraction. In 1747, Andreas Marggraf isolated sugar from beetroots and found them at concentrations of 1.3–1.6%. He demonstrated that sugar could be extracted from beets, identical with sugar produced from sugarcane, his student, Franz Karl Achard, evaluated 23 varieties of mangelwurzel for sugar content and selected a local strain from Halberstadt in modern-day Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.
Moritz Baron von Koppy and his son further selected from this strain for conical tubers. The selection was named weiße schlesische Zuckerrübe, meaning white Silesian sugar beet, boasted about a 6% sugar content; this selection is the progenitor of all modern sugar beets. A royal decree led to the first factory devoted to sugar extraction from beetroots being opened in Kunern, Silesia in 1801; the Silesian sugar beet was soon introduced to France, where Napoleon opened schools for studying the plant. He ordered that 28,000 hectares be devoted to growing the new sugar beet; this was in response to British blockades of cane sugar during the Napoleonic Wars, which stimulated the rapid growth of a European sugar beet industry. By 1840, about 5% of the world's sugar was derived from sugar beets, by 1880, this number had risen more than tenfold to over 50%; the sugar beet was introduced to North America after 1830, with the first commercial production starting in 1879 at a farm in Alvarado, California.
The sugar beet was introduced to Chile by German settlers around 1850. "The beet-root, when being boiled, yields a juice similar to syrup of sugar, beautiful to look at on account of its vermilion color". This was written by 16th-century scientist, Olivier de Serres, who discovered a process for preparing sugar syrup from the common red beet. However, because crystallized cane sugar was available and provided a better taste, this process never caught on; this story characterizes the history of the sugar beet. The competition between beet sugar and sugarcane for control of the sugar market plays out from the first extraction of a sugar syrup from a garden beet into the modern day; the use of sugar beets for the extraction of crystallized sugar dates to 1747, when Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, professor of physics in the Academy of Science of Berlin, discovered the existence of a sugar in vegetables similar in its properties to that obtained from sugarcane. He found. Despite Marggraf’s success in isolating pure sugar from beets, their commercial manufacture for sugar did not take off until the early 19th century.
Marggraf's student and successor Franz Karl Achard began selectively breeding sugar beet from the'White Silesian' fodder beet in 1784. By the beginning of the 19th century, his beet was about 5–6% sucrose by weight, compared to around 20% in modern varieties. Under the patronage of Frederick William III of Prussia, he opened the world's first beet sugar factory in 1801, at Cunern in Silesia; the work of Achard soon attracted the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte, who appointed a commission of scientists to go to Silesia to investigate Achard's factory. Upon their return, two small factories were constructed near Paris. Although these factories were not altogether a success, the results attained interested Napoleon. Thus, when two events, the blockade of Europe by the British Navy and the Haitian Revolution, made the importation of cane sugar untenable, Napoleon seized the opportunity offered by beet sugar to address the shortage. In 1811, Napoleon issued a decree appropriating one million francs for the establishment of sugar schools, compelling the farmers to plant a large acreage to sugar be
Yomari
Yomari called Yamari, is a delicacy of the Newar community in Nepal. It is a steamed dumpling that consists of an external covering of rice flour and an inner content of sweet substances such as chaku; the delicacy plays a important role in Newaa society, is a key part of the festival of Yomari punhi. According to some, the triangular shape of the yamari is a symbolical representation of one half of the shadkona, the symbol of Saraswati and wisdom; the name Yamari comes from two Newari Bhasa words, "ya:" meaning "to like" and "mari" meaning "delicacy". So it is a delicacy, popular; the Yomari punhi festival is said to have started from panchal nagar. Myth has it that Suchandra and Krita, a married couple, first experimented with fresh yield of rice from their field, and what took. The new delicacy was distributed among the villagers; as the food was liked by all, the bread was named Yamari, which means'tasty bread'. The myth further states that on the same day the couple offered the god of wealth, passing by in a disguise, the new delicacy.
Following this, Kubera blessed the couple with wealth. He declared that whoever will prepare Yamari in the form of gods and goddesses on the full moon of December and observe four days of devotion to god, will get rid of poverty; the festival of Yomari punhi is celebrated on the second day of the full moon when prayers are offered during which the Yomaris are stored and not eaten on that day. On the fourth and the final day the people belonging to the Newa community consume the sweet bread as a gift from gods and this practice marks the end of the festival. List of Nepalese dishes How to make Yomari
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