Clarification of Natal Juices without the Aid of Sulphur

Many chemists in this country have spent a considerable amount of time on research, and the latest ideas from overseas have been tried out in the laboratory. The efforts of these investigators have not been crowned with success. In most countries simple defecation is the usual routine treatment for raw sugar manufacture. The treated juices settle completely in an hour, or at the most in an hour and ten minutes. The juices are bright and clear, the mud volume is even lower than our highly sulphited juices, and the insoluble solids content of the settlings is fairly high. The question naturally arises: Why does the floc produced by only liming the juices in other countries, settle rapidly and yield a low mud volume? The writer has, for many years, carried out a certain amount of laboratory work on the purification of juices without sulphur, and considering that the proportion of variety canes has reached the high figure of 80 per cent., it was thought that the time would be most opportune to put these laboratory experiments to, the acid test. The process was tried out for a week in the factory -it failed utterly.