Applied Thermal Engineering 23 (2003) 15671575

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Energy and cogeneration targeting for a sugar factory

J. Raghu Ram, Rangan Banerjee
*

Energy Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, India Received 6 August 2002; received in revised form 21 February 2003; accepted 11 March 2003

Abstract The sugar industry in India has a potential of 3500 MW to export to the grid. In this paper an energy balance has been carried out for an actual 5000 TCD plant and a Sankey diagram is drawn. A pinch analysis is done for the sugar factory and reveals that the minimum hot utility requirement is lower than the actual by 9%. Modied evaporator designs are proposed as it has been found that the existing plant is not optimum with regard to the surface area of the evaporators and the amount of steam being consumed. Exergy analysis is applied to the existing and the proposed evaporator eects and the results are compared. It is concluded that the amount of steam consumption will reduce by 9 T/h and exergy losses are reduced by 48% of its original value if the existing quadruple eect is modied to a quintuple eect. The turbine hardware model is used to predict the optimum amount of power that can be cogenerated from the system for dierent generation temperatures at a pressure of 45 bar. The optimum superheat temperature is found to be 600 C for a backpressure turbine with single extraction. A cost analysis is performed to determine the variation of the average cost of generation of power with the generation temperature of the steam. 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Sugar; Evaporator; Pinch; Grand composite curve; Exergy; Turbine hardware model

1. Introduction India faces a peak electric generating shortage of over 20% and an energy shortage of 12%. India is the worlds largest producer of sugar, with over 430 sugar mills [1] producing an estimated 12 millions tons of sugar annually. The rapidly changing markets for sugar and energy provide an excellent opportunity to develop innovative methods to optimize the cogenerated power from the sugar plants that can reduce the energy shortage faced by the country. Market studies [1] have
*

Corresponding author. Tel.: +91-22-2576-7883; fax: +91-22-2572-6875/5723-3480. E-mail address: rangan@me.iitb.ac.in (R. Banerjee).

1359-4311/03/$ - see front matter 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S1359-4311(03)00101-7

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Nomenclature TCD GCC THM VHP HP LP CRF ACG tons crushed per day grand composite curve turbine hardware model very high pressure high pressure low pressure capital recovery factor average cost of generation

indicated that an additional power of 3500 MW can be generated through the use of cogeneration in the sugar industry. This paper builds up an energy balance for an operating plant and estimates the magnitude of the optimum power that can be cogenerated from the plant. Sugar can be produced either from sugar beet or sugar cane. In India, sugar is mainly produced from sugar cane. The sugar extraction process can be broadly classied into the following steps. The juice that is extracted from the sugar cane contains 80% by weight of water that requires to be evaporated. The juice is heated, after which it is treated with various chemical reagents like lime, sulphuric acid, phosphoric acid, carbonic acid, magnesia etc to remove the impurities. It is then passed through a set of evaporators, in which the water is evaporated and syrup is formed in the end. The syrup is then heated in a vacuum pan before being sent into a centrifugal machine, in which the white sugar crystals are separated out. The fuel that is used in the boilers is bagasse, which is a by-product of the sugar extraction process.

2. System description and energy balance Typically, sugar factories in India have a steam generation pressure and temperature of 22 bar and 330 C, respectively [2]. The capacities of Indian sugar factories are usually 2500 TCD or 5000 TCD. Most sugar factories have been increasing their steam generation pressures and providing surplus power to the grid. The sugar factory considered is the Jawahar Sugar Factory located at Kolhapur, Maharashtra. The capacity of the plant is 5000 TCD with a steam generation pressure of 45 bar 1. The evaporative system that is installed in the factory is a quadruple evaporative system without vapour bleeding. The raw juice (30 C, brix 15%) that is obtained by crushing the sugar canes is heated to 72 C with the vapours bled from the third evaporator. The juice is then subjected to the purication processes mentioned previously and is subsequently heated to 117 C by the steam generated from the boiler. The clear juice is then passed through all the evaporators in succession, after which a syrup (brix 67%) is obtained. The schematic of the
1

Log sheets at Jawahar Sugar Factory, Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India 2001.

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existing sugar production process is shown in Fig. 1. The syrup is then heated in vacuum pans by vapours bled from the second evaporator. It is then passed over into the centrifugal separator, wherein the sugar crystals are separated out. The energy balance is carried out for the typical operating data for the Jawahar Sugar Factory.

Fig. 1. Schematic of the existing sugar production process.

Fig. 2. Sankey diagram for the process.

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In performing the energy balance, the temperature of each stage of the evaporator is assumed to be constant. The amounts of losses due to radiation from the evaporators and the losses during heat exchange are taken as given by Hugot [3]. The result of the energy balance for the system under consideration is summarized as a Sankey diagram in Fig. 2. This diagram is constructed by taking the amount of energy input into the rst evaporator as the base value. Taking this value as the reference, the remaining energy ows are drawn.

3. Utility targeting In order to predict the minimum utility requirement while maximizing the heat recovery, a pinch analysis of the sugar plant is performed. In the past, pinch analysis for a paper and pulp industry [4], diary industry [5] etc. have been performed but there is no literature available for a sugar factory. According to Linnho [6], pinch analysis is a targeting procedure used for the scoping and screening of options during targeting prior to design. Targeting involves the optimum performance per process prior to any detailed design, and is very useful to preliminary energy and resource analysis. The targeting maybe energy targeting which involves maximum energy recovery, area targeting which involves calculation of minimum surface area for the heat transfer, shaft work targeting, extracting maximum work output from the process streams. The pinch analysis has been done with the existing evaporator designs and with a minimum approach temperature of 10 C. The result of the pinch analysis, the grand composite curve (GCC) for the plant is shown in Fig. 3. It can be inferred from the gure that the pinch point is at 35 C and the hot utility requirement is 81.3 MW. The whole process is above the pinch point, i.e.

Fig. 3. Grand composite curve of the process.

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there is no cold utility requirement. The actual hot utility in the process is 89.4 MW. Despite keeping evaporator designs xed, it was seen that the utility requirement is 9% lower than the plant requirement. The possibility of system improvement by optimum evaporator design is considered using exergy analysis.

4. System improvement and exergy analysis of evaporators It is observed that the present set-up installed in the factory is not optimum with regard to the surface area of the evaporators and the amount of exhaust steam consumption. Using the concepts given by Hugot [3], it has been found that the existing surface area of the quadruple eect evaporators is higher than the optimum area required by 36%. If for the same amount of water to be evaporated, a quintuple eect evaporator system is designed such that the total surface area of the evaporators is minimized; the amount of steam required is reduced by 9 T/h. A schematic of the proposed quintuple eect evaporator is shown in Fig. 4. It is observed that the total surface area of the new design is less than that of the original by 7%. In case of expansion or new plants it would be worthwhile to opt for an optimal design with quintiple eect evaporators. The new design results in annual saving of fuel costs of Rs. 4.8 million. The incremental capital cost is likely to have a payback within a year. In order to assess the eciency of the evaporative process and to nd out ways to improve it, exergy analysis is applied to the evaporators. According to Ahern [7], exergy is dened as the work that is available in a gas, uid or mass as a result of its non-equilibrium condition relative to some reference frame. It calculates the true thermodynamic eciency of the process and is based on the second law of thermodynamics. As exergy is an explicit property at steady state conditions, its value can be calculated at any point in an energy system from the other properties that are determined from an energy balance on each process in the system. The general explicit equation that

Fig. 4. Schematic of the modied sugar production process with quintuple eect.

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Fig. 5. Comparison of the amount of exergy lost.

is used under conditions where the gravitational and momentum terms in the general equation can be neglected is shown in Eq. (1). Ex h hr Tr s sr 1

The terms h and s denote the enthalpy and the entropy of the substance respectively and the terms with a subscript r represent the reference condition. The amount of exergy lost in any process is represented by the percentage of exergy lost which is dened as shown in Eq. (2). g Exi Exo 100 Exi 2

The reference condition that has been chosen to perform the exergy analysis is Tr 303 K, sr 0:437 kJ/kg K and hr 125:8 kJ/kg. The relations given by Taner [8] are used to estimate the entropy and enthalpy of the sugar solution. A graph between the temperature of the evaporator vessel and the cumulative amount of exergy lost is drawn for both the cases and shown in Fig. 5. It can be seen in the gure that the cumulative amount of exergy lost in the evaporators decreases from 33.5 to 17.6 MW if the quadruple eect is modied to a quintuple eect.

5. Power generation and cost analysis The pinch analysis predicts the minimum utility requirement but gives no information about the amount of power that can be cogenerated from the system. In order to identify the potential for cogeneration, the methodology of turbine hardware model [9] is applied to the GCC generated above to extract the information required for the analysis of the steam turbine network. In generating power it is possible to use backpressure or condensing turbines with extractions In Jawahar Sugar Factory, the steam generation pressure had been increased from 22 to 45 bar in order to provide surplus power to the grid. In this paper an analysis has been done for a backpressure turbine with a single extraction (with the generation pressure at 45 bar).

J. Raghu Ram, R. Banerjee / Applied Thermal Engineering 23 (2003) 15671575 Table 1 Optimum power and pay back period Interval number 1 2 3 4 5 6 T (C) 350 400 450 500 600 700 Power (MW) 5.2 9.7 13.5 18.3 26.8 31.3 Net income (M Rs./yr) 0.10 4.29 7.60 12.95 22.51 19.21 Capital cost (M Rs.) 374.4 424.3 463.2 505.0 585.1 499.3

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Pay back period (month) 375 99 61 39 26 26

The THM is based on the principle of Willans line [10], which provides a linear relationship between steam ow rate and power output of the turbine. The capacity limitations of a backpressure turbine can be represented on a Willans line. At each operating point on the Willans line, the slope of the line joining the corresponding point to the origin gives the measure of the isentropic eciency of the turbine. An advantage of this method is that the non-linear variation of the isentropic eciency of the steam turbine with the power output is incorporated in Willans line in a linear fashion, which is particularly important when it comes to modeling the turbine. Thus, the Willans line of a simple backpressure turbine accounts for both the capacity limitations and the eciency variation with load. As the generation temperature of the steam is increased, the amount of power that can be cogenerated increases. The cost of turbines and boilers also increase as the generation temperature of the steam in increased. Thus, the time required to break even varies as the level of the steam generation temperature is varied. In order to capture this variation, a cost analysis 2 is performed for dierent degrees of super heat at 45 bar. In our calculations, it is assumed that the plant is operational continuously for a period of six months (JanJune) in a year and all the equipment is installed in the month of January. The capital cost incurred is the cost of purchasing and installing the turbines and boilers required to produce the necessary power and the super heated steam respectively. The data for the prices of turbines and boilers has been obtained from BHEL, Hyderabad for their existing products. The selling price of electricity is taken as Rs. 3 per kWh. The net income generated annually is calculated by subtracting the fuel costs from the revenue generated from selling the cogenerated power. The results of applying the methodology of THM to the GCC in Fig. 4 for dierent degrees of super heat at 45 bar and the corresponding pay back periods for each case are shown in Table 1. In calculating the operating cost for the boilers, the cost of bagasse per ton is taken to be equal to Rs. 600 and the caloric value to be 14 000 kJ/kg (20% moisture content). The life of the boiler is assumed to be 25 years. The cost analysis is performed for discount rates (d) equal to 20%, 30% and 40%. Discount rate [11] is the measure of the investors preference for the time value of money and is based on a variety of factors like the rate of ination, risk, real interest and return of expected capital. The annualized cost is obtained by multiplying the capital cost with the capital

1 US $ Rs. 48 in 2002.

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Fig. 6. Average cost of generation.

recovery factor (CRF). The CRF is a function of the discount rate (d) and the life of the equipment (n) and is calculated as shown in Eq. (3). CRF CRFd; n d1 dn n 1 d 1 3

The annual cost of operation is calculated using the equation shown below.         Annual Annualised capital Annualised capital Annual operating cost Cost of boiler Cost of turbine fuel cost The term average cost of generation (ACG), is dened as the ratio of the total annual costs incurred to the amount of power cogenerated. A graph between ACG and generation temperature for the discount rates mentioned above is plotted. The results of this exercise are shown in Fig. 6. It can be observed in the gure that the ACG and the generation temperature are inversely related to each other. The curve attens at around 600 C, implying that there is no gain in the ACG by increasing the generation temperature above 600 C. The average cost of generation at 600 C for the discount rates mentioned above is less than the selling price of electricity (Rs. 3 per kWh), which makes it viable to generate power at this temperature. The internal rate of return at 600 C is calculated to be 41%, which makes it an attractive option for the sugar factory.

6. Conclusion The data collected from a 5000 TCD working sugar plant was used to arrive at an energy balance for the evaporator section of the sugar plant. A pinch analysis was performed for the

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plant and the minimum hot utility requirement was found to be less than the existing utility by around 9%. A quintuple eect evaporator system is proposed which reduces the amount of steam consumption by 9 T/h and the exergy analysis indicate that the amount of exergy loss in the evaporators is reduced by 48% of its original value. The methodology of turbine hardware model was used to predict the optimum amount of power that can be cogenerated from the system for dierent generation temperatures at a pressure of 45 bar. A cost analysis was performed and the optimum superheat temperature was found to be 600 C for a backpressure turbine with single extraction. For a 5000 TCD plant the optimum cogenerated power is 26.8 MW. The investment is viable for the sugar factory with an internal rate of return of 41%.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Jawahar Sugar Factory and MEDA (Maharashtra Energy Development Agency).

References
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