American Crystal Sugar to Build Molasses Desugarization Project
American Crystal Sugar Company has announced plans to build a $103 million molasses desugarization project located in Hillsboro, ND.
The facility will extract residual sugar from molasses, which is a by-product of the company's primary sugarbeet production process. American Crystal currently operates one molasses desugarization facility at its East Grand Forks, Minnesota plant. Construction of the project will begin immediately with completion expected by fall of 1999.
The technology to be employed is a chromatographic separation process developed by Amalgamated Research Inc. and licensed to Idreco USA, Ltd.
ARi applies simulated moving bed chromatography technology to the desugarization of beet molasses. Compared with other separation systems, the SMB technology yields the highest purity/recovery and the lowest color products. In addition, ARi's proprietary Coupled Loop Chromatography allows for high recovery of multiple components including betaine and invert sugar.
ARi chromatographic separator for the recovery of sucrose. Operation of this simulated moving bed includes Coupled Loop Chromatography.
Sweetener applications include sucrose from sugar beet and sugar cane derived syrups, fructose and glucose from starch sources or invert sugar, and separation of specialty sugars from mixtures.
Although SMB chromatography has been very successfully applied to binary separations, there are considerations which prevent taking complete advantage of this type of operation. ARi's new Coupled Loop Chromatography maintains all of the advantages of true simulated moving bed chromatography while providing for the separation of any number of components. Features include production of high purity products, acceptable multi-pass operation, minimum sorbent requirements, minimum eluent use, retro-fit capability, and a large increase in the number of possible operating modes compared with conventional SMB.
The basis of Coupled Loop Chromatography is a formation of a dynamic, equilibrated network of separation loops that provides a new framework for the development of continuous chromatographic processes.
American Crystal is the largest beet sugar producer in the U.S., operating sugar factories at East Grand Forks, Crookston and Moorhead, MN, and Drayton and Hillsboro, ND.
For more information contact: Amalgamated Research Inc., 2531 Orchard Drive East, Twin Falls, Idaho 83301. Tel: 208-735-5400; Fax: 208-733-8604.