The Role and Characteristics of PAM in the Sugar Industry

Polyacrylamide may be industrial grade or food grade in sugar mills. Therefore, it is best to use different types of ionic polyacrylamide for different processes. PAM is often widely used in our daily life as a water treatment reagent. However, it also has many different advantages. In the sugar industry, this product can be used as an additive to effectively improve the sugar yield and viscosity of the product.

Polyacrylamide is used for clarification of sugar beet or sugarcane juice in sugar mills, and agglutination will occur in juice added with PAM polyacrylamide. In sugar factories, PAM is also used in sugar extraction, sugar factory sludge dewatering, sewage treatment and other processes. For example, sugar can be extracted with anionic polyacrylamide. In production and life, PAM flocculant is widely used in food waste water, such as alcohol factory, wine factory, sugar factory, meat processing factory, etc. There are flocculants in some things in daily life.

(1) Polyacrylamide is an indispensable additive in the sugar industry. Sugar is generally processed from beets and glycine, but the processing methods are different.

(2) The mixed sugar juice obtained from the juicer should be purified by heating, adding slaked lime and flocculants. Hydrated lime is a suspension of calcium hydroxide. Calcium glycolate is usually formed in sucrose solutions. Heating and adding lime destroys toxic bacteria and raises the pH from natural acidity (ph 5-6.5) to neutral. The control of pH value is an important link in the whole process of sugar production. Because at acidic pH, sucrose is converted into glucose and fructose. These three sugars break down rapidly when the pH exceeds 11.5.

(3) After heating to 99-104℃, add polyacrylamide to the neutral sugar juice and pump it into the clarifier. The sugar residue settles in the irrigation and the clarifier overflows from above. At this stage, dry powder polyacrylamide is added as an effective decolorizing agent. The clarified juice is sent to the evaporation process for further processing.

(4) Polyacrylamide can neutralize, bridge adsorption, and flocculate suspension. It can effectively reduce the frictional resistance of the fluid. Adding a small amount of polyacrylamide to water can reduce the resistance by 50%-80%. When the pH value is greater than 10, it is easy to be hydrolyzed. Thickening is more pronounced when the structure is semi-reticular.

Sugar beets and sugar cane can be processed into sugar by various processing methods. This process mainly includes sugarcane juice clarification by grinding or diffusion, clarification of sugarcane juice, fruit juice concentration by evaporation, crystallization of sugar and drying of sugar crystals. After all these processes, raw sugar can be produced, while sucrose does not strictly need to be refined, sugar from beets always goes through a sugar refining process to obtain white refined sugar for household use and as an ingredient in soft drinks and foods. Our SINOFLOC team will help our customers choose the right flocculant for sugar refining process.