Beet washing in the French way

Abstract

Beet washing is often considered to be of secondary priority compared with other stations of the beet sugar process. But it is as important as the others are and one can consider it as the first stage of purification. Many positive or negative effects in the downstream stations originate here. The French system uses drum washers for pre/main and final washing. They treat the beet gently and efficiently, resulting in low remaining tare content and low sugar losses as well, even with heavy and sticky soils. The wash water is mainly flowing counter-current to the beet flow with the effect, that water demand is low and dry matter in the outlet water is higher than most other systems. This technology, engineered in the right way, can generate many positive effects on the entire front-end operation of the factory.