Use of the Sri Sucrose Analyser to Analyse for Sucrose in a Factory Laboratory

The Sugar Research Institute (SRI) in Australia provided the SMRI with a Sucrose Analyser for evaluation. Although the Sucrose Analyser is designed for online measurement of sucrose concentrations, this application describes the direct measurement of sucrose in factory streams in a laboratory environment. The Sucrose Analyser provides a quick and cost effective way of estimating the sucrose concentrations in factory steams. The Sucrose Analyser is supplied with a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) interface including a serial output used for transferring the data to a personal computer. A suite of software programmes was developed to acquire the data from the analyser to be saved for spreadsheet analysis, transferred to a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) or to be printed. A calibration procedure was developed to set up calibrations for different factory products. This procedure involved measuring samples with known sucrose (or pol) content taken from the factory stream of interest. A linear regression performed on the data provides the coefficients for estimating the unknown sucrose concentration in a sample from the same stream. A calibration curve of measured absorbance against sucrose must be set up for each individual factory stream. Correlations for various streams can provide sucrose estimates within acceptable experimental error limits. It was shown that a temperature compensation factor is not needed.