Lynne Wong's PhD thesis

ages in Table 3.12. The material loss consists principally of the loss of water and to a
much lesser extent, sucrose and other constituents of the sugar cane component parts.
The greatest loss appears to be in the stalk, followed by top, rind, green leaf, and then dry
leaf. For the dry leaf, the loss for the 36-week batch was 37.4%, for the 52-week batch,
40.1% and for the 44-week batch, 62.6%. This is probably because the 44-week batch
samples were harvested on a rainy day; the leaves had picked up rain water and had a
higher moisture content than normal.
3.5.2 Dry mass % cane extracted from sugar cane component parts
From Tables 3.5 – 3.7, it is also possible to calculate the dry mass % cane extracted as
rind, stalk fibre and stalk pith. The results are presented in Table 3.13. Since the nodes
had been excluded from fibre extraction, the mass of cane was taken to be the mass of stalk
plus rind only. The lowest dry mass extracted was from the hard fibre of the stalk,
followed by stalk pith and rind.
89