In the east African country of Ethiopia, high-tech sugar production plants have been the focus of food-processing investments. These plants rely on diffusers—large, horizontal installations that extract sugar from sugar cane. Each diffuser can extract up to 12,000 tons of sugar per day. Horizontal diffusers in sugar extraction typically measure 64 meters (m) long, 14 m wide and 8 m high. Twelve juice troughs are distributed along the length of the lower part. A chain conveyor above the troughs carries sugar cane at 0.6 m per minute after it has been shredded at the plant entrance. Water washes the cane in the cross-counter current, increasing the sugar content from one trough to the next. "With an average sugar content of 12 percent, sugar cane is an ideal raw material for producing sugar," said Torsten Jüttner, technical project manager at BMA Automation GmbH in Braunschweig, Germany. His company specializes in the construction of sugar production plants, particularly in African countries. "Almost a dozen of these plants are planned to be built within a decade," Jüttner said. "We've already received the orders for the first two factories, and we're in the implementation phase."
An IO-Link configuration manages key sugar extraction equipment, saving space and installation costs.
01/22/2015
BMA Automation GmbH chose compact starters for sugar production plants in Ethiopia and installed them vertically in control cabinets.
IO-Link masters can be plugged as boards into the distributed I/O system. Each board has four channels, and each channel can switch up to four drives—16 in total.