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Lynne Wong's PhD thesis

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CHAPTER 2. IMPACT OF EXTRANEOUS MATTER ON CANE JUICE<br />

QUALITY AND MILLING PERFORMANCE, AND THE PHENOMENON<br />

OF BRIX-FREE WATER IN DRY LEAF<br />

With the increasing trend in mechanised loading of cane which started in Mauritius in the<br />

mid-1970s, more extraneous matter (EM) is now being sent with the cane to the mills.<br />

Extraneous matter in cane consists of dry and green leaves, immature cane tops, roots,<br />

dead stems, soil and any other non-cane material, all of which increase the costs of harvest<br />

and transport, as well as the cost of mill maintenance. Extraneous matter in cane may also<br />

necessitate investment in new equipment to cope with the increased crushing and milling<br />

capacity of the factory (Wong Sak Hoi and Autrey, 1997). It also lengthens the crushing<br />

season. It is therefore essential to investigate and quantify the effects of certain kinds of<br />

extraneous matter, in particular, dry leaves, green leaves and tops on cane and juice<br />

quality, on milling operations and on sugar recovery.<br />

As already mentioned in Section 1.3, the use of the term trash or dry trash will be used to<br />

refer to the dry leaves associated with cane stalks.<br />

In this chapter, experiments performed to study the effect of the controlled addition of<br />

extraneous matter to clean cane will be described and discussed.<br />

2.1 EFFECT OF EXTRANEOUS MATTER ON CANE JUICE QUALITY AND<br />

MILLING PERFORMANCE<br />

In the present study, the effects of dry trash, green leaves and immature cane tops were<br />

investigated by adding each type of EM to sub-samples of clean cane so that it constitutes<br />

5, 10 and 20% of the total mass, and applying maceration water at 33% on cane to obtain<br />

“mixed juice”, since the average maceration water used on cane in all Mauritian sugar<br />

factories in 2000 was 33.3% (Anon., 2001b). The extracted “mixed juice” samples were<br />

analysed, in particular, for fructose (F), glucose (G) and sulfated ash (Ash), to predict the<br />

sucrose loss in molasses by means of the target purity (TP) of molasses by using the South<br />

African equation (Rein and Smith, 1981):

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