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Sugar Seed
Supersaturation
and things that make up or the procedure or things to make Sugar Crystals ?

2007-03-22 13:58:11 · 2 answers · asked by ? 2 in Science & Mathematics Botany

2 answers

Supersaturation is the point you reach in a solution where no more solute can be dissolved in the solvent, and the extra solute present is precipitating, or crashing out of the solution.

2007-03-22 14:02:53 · answer #1 · answered by Mr. X 1 · 1 0

Extraction
The first stage of processing is the extraction of the cane juice. In many factories the cane is crushed in a series of large roller mills: similar to a mangle [wringer] which was used to squeeze the water out of clean washing a century ago. The sweet juice comes gushing out and the cane fibre is carried away for use in the boilers. In other factories a diffuser is used as is described for beet sugar manufacture. Either way the juice is pretty dirty: the soil from the fields, some small fibres and the green extracts from the plant are all mixed in with the sugar.



Evaporation
The factory can clean up the juice quite easily with slaked lime (a relative of chalk) which settles out a lot of the dirt so that it can be sent back to the fields. Once this is done, the juice is thickened up into a syrup by boiling off the water using steam in a process called evaporation. Sometimes the syrup is cleaned up again but more often it just goes on to the crystal-making step without any more cleaning. The evaporation is undertaken in order to improve the energy efficiency of the factory.

Boiling
The syrup is placed into a very large pan for boiling, the last stage. In the pan even more water is boiled off until conditions are right for sugar crystals to grow. You may have done something like this at school but probably not with sugar because it is difficult to get the crystals to grow well. In the factory the workers usually have to throw in some sugar dust to initiate crystal formation (sugar seeding). Once the crystals have grown the resulting mixture of crystals and mother liquor is spun in centrifuges to separate the two, rather like washing is spin dried. The crystals are then given a final dry with hot air before being stored ready for despatch.

Check out the link for pictures and more details on sugar manufacture.

2007-03-22 22:03:12 · answer #2 · answered by onyx27 3 · 1 0

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