Revolutionary Candle Type Precoat Filtration Within the Sugar Industry -- A Production Scale Plant Trial Experience.

After outstanding success in mud juice filtration, proven within a sugar beet factory in Germany through pilot trials during the campaign 2022/2023 this paper will be about the next stage of evolution into a production scale plant trial. The factory, part of a major beet sugar producer in Germany, decided to invest in a retro- fit to Lenzing's newly developed and patented candle type cake filtration system CakeFil. The factory has been operating candle type precoat filters with traditional design in mud juice filtration stage. It has already challenged the LENZING CakeFil design in pilot scale throughout the last campaign and saw a smoothly running mud juice filtration without any intervention over the whole campaign, whereas the existing filtration required seven filter cloth changes and numerous hot water flushing steps during the same period. In this filtration stage at this particular factory a cloth exchange means emptying and opening seven pressure vessels with a diameter of 3 meters (12') and exchanging filter cloth on 288 candles per unit. Which equals more than 14 000 candles to be manipulated throughout an average campaign. A hot water flushing step additionally means to take the filter out of filtration service for 3 hours. Therefore, factory and corporate management decided to exchange the candle design as well as the way of operation on one of their existing process scale filters for a plant trial. The results of this plant trial will be presented in detail within this jointly developed paper. To date the very young 2023/2024 campaign just started, but the plant trial already shows very promising results as the newly equipped unit did not require a single manual or other intervention whereas the existing filters already called for hot water flushing of each individual filter every other day due to decreasing performance. At the time of presentation, the campaign will be finished and the paper will contrast the existing state of the art filtration system with the performance of the CakeFil in terms of net filtrate flow, downtime, filtrate quality and required manpower and spares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]