Descaling of Evaporator Tubes in Sugarcane Factories Using Molasses as a Green and Effective Technology

Abstract

Deposition inside sugarcane factory evaporators (SFE) significantly lowers the heat transmission and can cause corrosion. This consequently reduces their efficiency, which is clearly a severe issue in the industrial sector. Up to the present time, caustic soda remains the most widely used reagent for descaling sugar industry evaporators. Understanding the scale's composition assists in determining which kinds of cleaners can effectively clean the evaporators. Scales are built in sugar evaporators as a result of the phosphitation or sulfitation processes used to chemically clean juice. In this perspective, molasses is used to descale SFE as a green manner. Molasses includes significant amounts of organic acids and nitrogenous chemical compounds, as shown by GC-mass analysis, and can be utilized as cleaning agents. XRD patterns for four scales from different sugar evaporators indicated that calcium sulfate and calcium phosphate were the predominant components at Egypt's Quos Sugarcane Factory and Dishina Sugarcane Factory, respectively. Actually, dispersed molasses demonstrated an acceptable removal effectiveness of up to 65% in all tested evaporative bodies. Furthermore, molasses solutions were tested in both basic and acidic settings and did not promote corrosion through the body's evaporative tubes. The oxidation of the molasses mixture with air or hydrogen peroxide showed that the efficacy of scale removal decreased. The findings suggested that molasses, as byproduct of sugarcane factories can be successfully employed in descaling as a green cleaning agent. This could be helpful in the development of descaling materials for the industrial sector.