Today, almost no family can do without sugar on the table. It is well known to everyone and is part of a large number of dishes. From the point of view of chemistry, sugar can be called any substance that is included in a rather extensive group of carbohydrates, soluble in water, having a sweet taste and having a low molecular weight. But in everyday life, this is commonly called sucrose, produced mainly from beets or sugarcane.
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How to make beet sugar
Beetroot is the most common and convenient raw material for sugar production. As it quickly deteriorates, sugar factories are usually located close to fields. Beets are washed, cut into chips and loaded into the so-called diffuser, which extracts sugar from the plant mass with the help of hot water. Thus obtained "diffusion juice" is usually 10-15% saturated with sucrose and has a dark color, since the organic substances that make up the beets darken during oxidation. Waste from this process goes to livestock feed. Next, the diffusion juice is cleaned. It is placed in closed metal tanks and treated with milk of lime, as well as sulfur dioxide. As a result, harmful impurities precipitate, which is removed using various filters and sedimentation tanks. By evaporation, excess water is removed. Then crystallization is performed, for which vacuum devices are used. The size of which in some cases is comparable to the size of a two-story house. The resulting product contains sucrose crystals and molasses, separated by centrifugation. The result is obtaining solid sugar, which is subjected to additional drying. It can already be eaten.