Whatever happened to the Steffen House, once a critical figure of beet sugar factories, mainly in Europe? A Steffen House was considered so essential to the economic achievement of a beet sugar factory that a chief player in the affair of building and operating beet sugar factories in the earliest days of the 20th Century, Henry Oxnard, said he would not accept a contract to erect a sugar factory unless it included a Steffen House.
A key measurement of a beet factory's routine then and now is the percent of sucrose in molasses. The advent of any sucrose in molasses is verify that sugar intended for the warehouse, refined up, instead, in molasses. In Oxnard's day, molasses was deemed a waste manufactured goods and as such was regularly poured into the rivers abutting a sugar factory. Typically, in a ordinary factory missing a Steffen House, or in this more present period, an ion-exchange process, beet molasses will consist of fifty percent sucrose, an unacceptable loss to those engaged in the management of a beet factory. Factory superintendents submit to the presence of sugar in molasses as "purity". High purities, then, imitate high sugar losses to molasses - the same as pouring cash down the drain.
Molasses production is commonly equal to five percent on beets processed, thus a factory run of 1,000,000 tons of beets could result in the production of 50,000 tons of molasses which would contain roughly 25,000 tons of sugar which would have a market regard of ten million dollars, assuming sugar is sold at $.20 per pound, net of manufacturing costs. It must go without adage that the prevention of the loss of sugar to molasses is a dominant challenge to beet factory managers. Since early, technology captured as much sugar as permitted by equipment then extant, the next curative was to take out sugar from molasses. That became the role of the Steffen House.
The Steffen administer was a mode for extracting sugar from molasses invented by Carl Steffen a Vienna born Austrian who patented the administer in 1883 while engaged in sugar manufacture in Moravia. While his mode has numerous variations, the administer in the end starts by diluting molasses with water (enough to start a key of 5-12% sucrose) and cooling it to a very low warmth (below 18 degrees C) after which finely minced lime (Calcium oxide) in sufficient quantity to establish a relationship of 130 percent to the sucrose content is continuously added with fight at a standardized and slow rate. The sugar in the molasses combines with the lime and a saccharage of lime is twisted which is unfathomable in the liquid. The saccharate was then separated and washed in a filter press. The cake from the filter press (saccharate of lime) was diverse with sweet water to a homogeny of cream and took the house of milk of lime in the carbonation process.
About ninety percent of the sugar formerly in the beet was extracted in those factories that employed the Steffen process. In some facilities, the waste water from the Steffen process, which was rich in fertilizing qualities (primarily potassium sulfate), was used for irrigating domain next-door the factory. The structure designed to accommodate the equipment employed in the Steffen administer became commonly referred to in the industry as the "Steffen's House".
The Steffen administer won instant popularity in Europe but establish less favor in the United States most likely in view of the fact that the administer was more refined in terms of its associated chemistry than any administer introduced into a beet factory up in anticipation of that time. The first such administer was installed in 1888 at Watsonville, California. It was a tiny pilot plant with three 5-foot coolers supplied by the Grevenbroich Machinery Company of Germany. Grevenbroich eventually supplied much of the equipment for three pioneer California factories, Watsonville, Los Alamitos, and Chino and nonstop to supply Oxnard's Steffen administer equipment in anticipation of his company and Kilby Manufacturing of Cleveland, Ohio, started producing improved models a few being later.
In the United States, the list of accomplished chemists who held lead positions in beet factories was slim. Often factory superintendents hewed to tried and right technology of the past, preferring methods learned from experience rather than scholarship. Guided by practical experience as a replacement for of theory, they would without malevolence reject thoughts and methods for which they lacked a basis for understanding. The Watsonville experimental Steffens administer was modest used, for example, in view of the fact that the factory director "did not believe in it."
The fundamental attraction of the Steffen administer lay in comparative advantage. Molasses was then an unwanted commodity and presented itself more as a waste issue than a salable product. Removing sugar from molasses was regarded as being paid excellent regard from a touch that would otherwise be discharged into the river, a practice that was from the earliest days of the U.S. beet industry frowned upon by those who relied upon rivers for additional industrial purposes, together with fishing. In time, molasses, which is in the end a sugar syrup that has been through the factory a digit of times and is by the administer of elimination frequently sugarbeet waste containing fifty percent sucrose, establish a variety of markets. Early on, it became a fund of ethyl alcohol but lost favor for many being in view of the fact that of the low cost of unknown crude oil. Interest in ethyl alcohol production would revive in the 1970's when crude oil prices rose. Molasses is also a principal raw material for the production of baker's proliferate and is a chief fund for the production of monosodium glutamate (MSG) and citric acid. However the volume demanded by those users was low compared to the quantity made available by the nation's beet sugar companies. The price of molasses was low as a consequence.
The 1970's saw attitudes about factory waste change from acceptance by the all-purpose public to a near total rejection of the premise that in view of the fact that of the excellent factories do (provide useful products and economic strength) their waste products must be tolerated. Thus the Steffens administer which bent liquid waste impression high alkalinity and pH as well as high organic content and consequent malodorous compounds became unwelcome. A Steffens House discharged waste water in amounts as fantastic as eight hundred percent of the volume of molasses processed.
Various studies indicated that it was doable to modernize the strength of the odors emanating from Steffen waste. The cost, however, to install and operate effective systems would offset the economic gains provided by the process. Thus factory managers who employed the Steffens administer started shutting them down and those who desired the repayment of such a process, looked elsewhere. In addendum to its shortcomings on the environmental front, the Steffens administer recovered only about 60% of the sugar in molasses. Sugar manufacturers started looking somewhere else for a key to the task of recovering sugar from molasses. Seeping into their thoughts was the thought that it would be better to dodge making molasses in the first place. They turned to ion exchange, a administer that would anticipate the making of molasses in the traditional sense.
Ion exchange, or deionization, is a mode of reducing impurities from juice which then allows for increased extraction of sugar. The attitude of ion chat has been known for more than 125 being but seldom used in the beet sugar industry in view of the fact that of its awkward habit of rising the sodium content of sugar juices which retards the ability of sugar to crystallize. However, later-day sugar manufacturers have turned to the practice of ion-exclusion chromatography which was first used fruitfully to produce high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The administer is based on the exclusion of ionic compounds and the inclusion of nonionic compounds.
Molasses, then, once regarded as a thief who captured huge volumes of valuable sugar all through the sugar manufacturing administer had been made, at last, to give up its plunder via ion chat everywhere the sugar recovery rates get to ninety percent compared to sixty percent in the ancient Steffens House and without unenthusiastic environmental impact. And yet another bonus awaited sugar factories that turned to ion exchange.
Modern factories beginning in the 1990's started producing betaine from molasses, a valued food additive with bonus therapeutic benefits. The University of Maryland Medical Center noted in one of its studies that inexpensive wines that use beet sugar to boost the alcohol content, contain betaine. Some experts recommend that this may clarify why wine drinkers from France tend to have low rates of heart disease even with diets high in stout and cholesterol. More cogent, however, is the regard of betaine as a feed supplement for chickens and pigs. A digit of experiments show that the addendum of betaine to the feeds improves performance. Also, studies with pigs indicate an effect of betaine in energy metabolism and a astute boost in growth hormones. Humans, too, are result uses for betaine as a food supplement below a uncommon name, trimethylglycine or TMG.
Thus, the Steffen process, once the savior of sugar manufactures fell into disregard in view of the fact that of environmental and cost concerns but made way for the more efficient and environmentally friendly ion exchange.
Sources:
GREAT WESTERN SUGAR COMPANY, The Technology of Beet Sugar Manufacture, The Great Western Sugar Company, Denver, Colorado, June 30, 1920 - an instruction blue-collar prepared largely by D. J. Roach for use by the operating employees of the company's beet sugar factories.
GUTLEBEN, Dan, The Sugar Tramp-1954- Michigan, Printed by: Bay City Duplicating Co, San Francisco, 1954
McGINNIS, R.A. (Ed.) 1982, Beet Sugar Technology, Fort Collins, Colorado, Beet Sugar Development Foundation
©2010 Thomas Mahar All Rights Reserved.
About the Author:
Thomas Mahar served as Executive Vice President of Monitor Sugar Company between 1984 and 1999 and as President of Gala Food Processing, a sugar packaging company, from 1993-1998. He retired in 1999 and now devotes his free time to writing about the history of the sugar industry. A two-time winner of writing awards, he authored, Sweet Energy, The Story of Monitor Sugar Company in 2001 and maintains a blog at http://beetsugarhistory.blogspot.com/.
Contact: Thomas Mahar E-mail tkmahar@aol.com
Thomas Mahar served as Executive Vice President of Monitor Sugar Company between 1984 and 1999 and as President of Gala Food Processing, a sugar packaging company, from 1993-1998. He authored, Sweet Energy, The Story of Monitor Sugar Company in 2001, and Michigan's Beet Sugar History (Newsbeet, Fall, 2006) and is a two time winner of writing awards from the Southwestern Writers Conference for his work with historical novels set in the South and Southwest during the War Between the States era.
©2009 Thomas Mahar - all rights reserved
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