Ion exchange thin juice softening using fractal technology

Despite many obvious processing benefits, thin juice softening has never reached the status of a standard unit operation in the beet sugar industry. Low capacity of available systems and consequently high investment cost as well as waste water and operating cost issues have been impediments that made softener implementations feasible only under particular circumstances. The introduction of waste free weak cation softening resulted in significant reduction of operating costs while the combination with fractal technology allows cutting down the process size dramatically. The paper provides information, which is helpful to re-evaluate the economics of thin juice softening. Therefore positively affected process areas are listed and general financial benefits from operating soft juice are assessed. More specific figures are given for different model cases, representing beet factories of various technological and energy efficiency standards with campaign lengths as typical for certain regions. A comparison of the results with the estimated installed cost of fractal weak cation softeners shows a good potential for this technology to become a standard unit operation for substantial parts of the beet sugar industry.