The Sugar Engineers

Sugar factory rules of thumb for equipment sizing

The following equipment sizing guide is based on sugar factory installations in Southern Africa, and is adapted from MJ Reid, South African Sugar Factory Plant Installations 1995, Sugar Milling Reasearch Institute, Durban.

The factory capacity in tonnes cane per hour [tch] or tonnes fibre per hour [tfh] used in the calculations to prepare this data is the nominal capacity of the factory, not the design capacity nor the maximum capacity nor current actual capacity, but the estimated normal capacity.

In the histograms below the vertical axis shows the relative frequency with which the parameter in question appears. The horizontal axis shows the various brackets into which the parameter is placed. For example in the cane prepartion section below, 24% of the factories had a total specific cane prep power of less than 62kW/tfh. In the next bracket 27% of the factories had total specific powers between 62 and 86kW/tfh. The next bracket; 86 to 110kW/tfh accounts for 36% of the factories and so on.