Twenty (20) engineers from Zilor Company, Lencois Paulista, SP, Brazil attended a week long Sugars seminar held in their Sao Jose factory in May 2010 (picture above). Training sessions covered program operation, model building, data display, error evaluation, and data export to an embedded or external spreadsheet. A variety of models were built and discussed along with different techniques for displaying results on the drawing or using them in calculations. In addition, the Advanced Monitoring System (AMS) for data import into factory models was discussed and data was imported into example models during the sessions.

Other two day training seminars were held in 2010 for American Crystal Sugar Company in Moorhead, Minnesota USA, Rogers Sugar in Vancouver, Canada and The Amalgamated Sugar Company in Paul, Idaho USA.

"Recently, the Amalgamated Sugar Company factory at Paul, Idaho utilized the Sugars program for the evaluation of waste heat recovery to reduce steam consumption during both the beet processing and juice processing campaigns. Detailed Sugars models of the process were built for both the beet and juice campaigns. The models provide a full analysis of the effects on cooling water and condensate from the factory for utilization of the waste heat. The Sugars models proved to be quite capable of precise prediction of the effects of process modifications on energy consumption and material process flows."

Chris Rhoten
Manager of Process Technology
The Amalgamated Sugar Company, LLC
Paul, Idaho USA
March 23, 2011

"We have three refineries in our group that use Sugars and each refinery has process differences that we model using a generic Sugars model that can be adapted to their unique characteristics. These localized models are used to explain the difference in steam use between the refineries and to run scenarios to quantify the steam reduction from possible changes. This allows projects to be prioritized based on sound knowledge of the benefits and to identify opportunities to further reduce steam and water use."

Peter Simpson
Group Technical Manager
Sugar Australia Ltd.
Yarraville Refinery
Australia
March 30, 2011

"The Sugars program has been a very useful tool in understanding the relationships ranging from color generation to waste heat recovery within the refining process. That knowledge can then be utilized to make sound economic decisions that ultimately add to the bottom line of the organization. The operations staff also uses the information from the model to change/modify equipment during the summer months to help eliminate bottlenecks in the operation during the campaign."

Dr. Jeff Sobolik
Operations Development
Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative
Wahpeton, North Dakota USA
March 31, 2011

Sugar companies, engineering firms and equipment suppliers in 40 countries have purchased a license to use Sugars. Since the last Sugars Letter, companies in France, India, Poland, Pakistan, South Africa, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Ethiopia and Indonesia have joined the growing list of Sugars users.

At the annual ASSCT (Louisiana division) meeting, February 7-10, 2011 in Lafayette, Louisiana USA, Fikadu Beyene did a presentation titled Using Sugars for Mill Optimization Projects that covered Sugars modeling of the Louisiana Sugar Cane Cooperative factory to evaluate different changes to reduce steam consumption and compare boiling schemes to reduce raw sugar color.

A Single Strike Boiling Scheme paper was presented by M. Inkson, P. Antier and M. Topfer at the SIT meeting in Savannah, Georgia USA, May 16-19, 2010. The paper discusses a single product boiling with an intermediate boiling refinery that is modeled using Sugars.

The International Society of Sugar Cane Technologists (ISSCT) meeting, March 8-11, 2010 in Vera Cruz, Mexico was the venue for a paper covering further results about the Advanced Monitoring System (AMS) add-on feature of Sugars. The title of the paper was On-Line Monitoring of Factory Processes by Boris Morgenroth, Stefan Pfau and L. Warner Weiss.

Demonstrations and training of Sugars can be done remotely using a high speed connection. This makes it easy to hold meetings anywhere in the world. Many companies have already participated in online meetings, demonstrations or training.