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Installation of new facilities and machinery in 1950
During the war, the Japanese stripped all the machinery from the buildings and after the war, the machines were found to be lying in the compound seriously deteriorated by the elements. It was evidently the intention of the Japanese to ship this machinery to Taiwan or Manchuria to be used in their own factories but they were prevented from doing so by the intensive Allied submarine warfare.
To restart the refinery, completely new machinery was purchased and installed.
The object of refining cane sugar is to remove impurities and prepare the pure sugar in various forms, a complex process that requires many kinds of machinery. Regardless of technological changes over tine, the basic sugar refining process is as follows:
First, juice is extracted from sugar cane, purified and crystallized, and, usually at this point, the raw crystallized sugar is transported to refineries for further refining.
At the refinery, the raw sugar is mixed with hot concentrated syrup to soften the outer coating of the crystals; the crystals are then separated from the syrup by spinning in a centrifugal. Next, the crystals are melted in hot water to form a sugar liquor. The liquor is first purified by a filtering process which traps undissolved impurities; it then goes through another set of filters – often consisting of animal charcoal – to further eliminate impurities and to lighten its colour. Following this, the resultant clear liquid is concentrated by boiling in a vacuum pan, and then seeded with fine sugar crystals for crystallization. When the crystals are large enough, the mixture of crystals and syrup is discharged from the pan, and processed through a set of centrifugals which separate the crystals from the syrup. The separated moist refined sugar crystals are dried in dryers; the dried sugar passes through sets of sieves or screens which remove undesirable coarse particles and dust and classify the sugar according to size. The sugar is then weighed and packed.
The separated syrup is boiled again so that more crystals are extracted from it, a process that can be repeated several times.
The photographs in this section document the process by which some of the new machines were installed in 1950, and show them in use afterwards.Introduction Boiler House Calandria Pan Refinery Coil Pan Recovery Pan Blanchard Crystalilizer Char Cistern Vallez Filter Centrifugal Granulator Syrup Tanks and Pumps Oil Tank Recommended Collection
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