Design and energy balance of a bagasse-fired water-tube boiler for non-centrifugal sugar production using steam technology

The article focuses on rigorously describing, analyzing, and calculating all the stages of the steam generation process by means of a water tube boiler using sugarcane bagasse as fuel. The steam produced will be used to improve the non-centrifuged sugar production process. Currently the jaggery production process use the direct combustion of bagasse and the improvements with steam production will allow obtain a product with a better quality and a lower environmental impact. The mathematical model is obtained from the law of conservation of energy for open systems in steady-state flow in thermodynamics and the laws of Fourier, Newton, and Stefan-Boltzmann in heat transfer. The Newton-Raphson method is applied to solve non-linear equations. Finally, the variation of fuel moisture and steam production is analyzed in the mass and energy balance.