Analysis of exergy and energy of sugar production process in sugar plant

Abstract

In this paper, the energy and exergy analysis results of sugar production processes were presented by using operational system data from the Kayseri sugar plant, Turkey. All sugar production processes were thought as a steady state open thermodynamics system and employed the energy and exergy analyses, based on the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The best values of the energy and exergy efficiencies were obtained as 95.1% for the juice production process and 74.3% for the juice concentration process respectively. Moreover, the location of the energy degradation and the irreversibility were determined during the whole sugar production processes. Consequently, it has been pointed out that the energy and exergy efficiencies can be improved if the rates of the energy degradation and irreversibility in the sugar production processes are reduced.