Design of small-scale electrocoagulation reactor for non-sugar removal of sugarcane juice

Abstract

The most common sugarcane juice purification method practiced in Java is liming and sulphitation. In this research, electrocoagulation method was used to purify the sugarcane juice. This research purpose is to design an electrocoagulation reactor for the non-sugar removal of sugarcane juice. The design method of the reactor is based on IR-Drop and surface area per volume ratio (S/V) optimization. Electrode type and configuration was chosen considering the characteristic of sugarcane juice. A circulated vertical flow reactor type was built to conduct the electrocoagulation. The dimension of the reactor was 10 × 10 × 24 cm and had 8 electrodes installed with 1 cm inter electrode distance. The electrode was aluminium plate and arranged in bipolar configuration. The experiment used 35, 45, and 55 volt, flow rate of 40 L/min, and 30 minutes reaction time with 5 minutes interval. The result showed that an increase in voltage and reaction time increases the non-sugar removal efficiency. The mixed juice treated by electrocoagulation with 55 volt for 5 minutes could remove the non-sugar up to 21.47% and 33.49% for 30 minutes reaction time. The average of non-sugar removal by sulphitation in Java is 11.50% and 29.00% by carbonation. This study shows that electrocoagulation is more effective than the conventional method in removing the non- sugar. With the right scaling up method, electrocoagulation is possible to be practiced in a large scale sugar industry. Future studies are needed to evaluate the performance of electrocoagulation in terms of the clear juice quality and process efficiency.