An improved understanding of mill feeding

Improvements in the miIl feeding process will enable existing milling units to process higher rates. If higher rates can be processed, the capital costs of purchasing new milling units to achieve higher rates can be avoided. The Australian sugar industry currently makes use of a model of mill feeding that was developed by the Sugar Research Institute in the late 1970s for the setting of the feed chute, underfeed nip and pressure feeder nip. No significant change in mill feeding performance has occurred in the past 20 years. In 1997, the Sugar Research Institute undertook measurements of mill feeding performance in six Australian factories and used those measurements to develop a new empirical feeding theory which was capable of satisfactorily explaining the differences in mill feeding performance in all of the six factories. This new theory has the potential to lead to improved mill setting guidelines which will enable existing milling units to process higher rates. This paper presents the results from the 1997 investigation and demonstrates the success of the new feeding model in matching the measured performance as well as the experimental data used to develop the original feeding theory.