Judicious use of instrumentation and adoption of various automatic process control system is essential for attaining higher technical efficiency and productivity in the sugar units. There are progressive sugar factories who have adopted such techniques resulting in much higher efficiency than the conventional one’s and now can be example for others, said Shri Narendra Mohan, Director, NSI in an appeal to the Indian sugar industry.
Process parameters like flow, temperature, pH are required to be essentially controlled in a sugar factory to produce superior quality sugar with minimum sugar loss during processing. Institute has worked actively with the industry over the last few years as a result of which juice flow stabilization, automatic temperature & pH control, level control, automatic cane feed control and automatic controls for regulating sugar crystallization have been installed. With these, the sugar losses during processing have reduced by around 20-25% with significant sugar quality improvement.
We are taking it further with the sugar industry for adoption of “artificial intelligence” and “internet of things (iot) are the future areas to work upon. Initial adoption of systems based on artificial intelligence at sugar crystallization and centrifugation stages show further efficiency enhancement, said Shri Brajesh Singh, Technical Officer (Instrumentation Engineering).
Looking to the need of the sugar industry, we started a course on “Automation and Process Control” and with the growing adoption of automation, now the demand has also increased, said Director. To facilitate hands on training, we have also set up a laboratory having modules of various such control systems, he said.
Our laboratory is one of its own kind having SCADA based temperature & flow control modules, modules for interlocking of mills and sophisticated instruments for temperature, pressure and vacuum measurement and calibration of instruments. Even the delegates from various foreign countries who visited us praised the infrastructural facilities, said Shri Virendra Kumar, Senior Instrumentation Engineer.
