The sugar beet goldmine revealed by infrared light

Sugar beet is an important global crop – from Asia to the Middle East, from North Africa and Europe to North America, sugar beet is a vital source of sugar, accounting for approximately 20% of world sugar production, or around 34 million tons of sugar produced annually from sugar beet*.  In Europe alone, sugar beet accounts for 1% of total utilized arable land**.

However, recovering the sugar from all that beet is a complex and expensive process that is often characterized by high input costs. In this context, the availability of reliable data required to improve production performance can give a vital edge in the battle to improve sugar recovery. In particular, rapid analysis with Near infrared (NIR) can provide a fast and reliable alternative to slow and labour-intensive traditional methods.

Providing multi-parameter test results in seconds at the push of a button, NIR has become widely adopted in food and agri industries, including sugar cane. Why then has the beet industry not yet shared in the obvious benefits of the technology? FOSS in-house expert, Martin Andersson, has over a decade of experience of applying infrared analysis and is an ardent advocate of how it can benefit the beet sector. Here’s what he had to say about how it works, how it can be applied to sugar beet and the potential it has to offer.

Starting with the basics, what is NIR analysis?
Near infrared, or NIR for short, is an accurate and rapid analysis method that is well suited for determining the quantities of the major constituents in most foods and agricultural products. 

The overall advantages of using NIR analysis is that it provides rapid analysis data for better decision making. It requires little or no sample preparation and no chemicals or consumables.  It is non-destructive, it is operator friendly and it is fast, that is to say from between 30-60 seconds to deliver a result. It works by directing Infrared light onto a sample. The light is modified according to the composition of the sample and this modified light is detected. The spectral modifications are then converted to information regarding the composition of the sample. 

And one further point, when we talk about NIR, we refer to the area of the infrared light spectrum defined by the wavelength range of 800 nanometers to 2500 nanometers. This near infrared wavelength area is particularly good for analyzing solid and semi-solid samples. And a sample such as sugar beet pulp is a perfect match here.

How can NIR be applied to the sugar beet extraction process?

NIR can be used from start to finish. It can monitor the quality of sugar coming into the factory, as well as minimising the loss of sugar throughout the production process, which is important to know. 

The user places a sample into the analyzer for one minute, where a light is shone onto it. Scans of the sample create a graph with peaks to indicate variations in key parameters, such as pol, brix, reducing sugars and moisture. The results are checked against targets to monitor evaporation and, ultimately, improve extraction performance. 

Having real-time moisture and sugar content measures are very important for several reasons. First and foremost, they help to determine how much a production plant should pay its suppliers. 

If a factory has, for example, a load of eight tons of sugar beet coming in, employees need to know how much to pay for that load. It’s important to be able to think not in terms of how many tons of sugar beet there are, but how much sugar is potentially there. There could maybe be 10% (800kg) of sugar in this delivery, for example. 

The technology also enables users to check more samples, more often, which makes it easy to check samples from numerous loads, since one truck might be carrying a different content than another.

How can NIR help during the extraction process?
Extraction is a continuous process, so it's important to measure samples throughout to know the value of its pol and brix.

Factories have a delicate balance to strike between extracting as much sugar as possible without crossing over into wasting resources. Hopefully, there’s as much sugar as possible coming out of the conveyor belt, but some will remain because it’s not possible to initially wash everything out. Factories aim for the best point of production, where they extract as much sugar as possible without wasting energy washing the remaining bits of sugar out.

How does NIR compare to traditional chemical analysis methods?
Measuring different parameters takes a lot of time and work when using traditional methods. Only one parameter can be measured at a time, and this requires the user to go through the whole process repeatedly.

Also, most of the procedures to measure these quality parameters rely on expensive chemical reagents, a large amount of manual labour, and complex processing of samples. 

NIR allows factories to measure samples often, and stay informed about what’s going on. If any sample preparation is required, it's minimal and it’s incomparable to the work required in the laboratory with traditional methods. 

Why is NIR currently so rarely used in the sugar beet extraction process?
Before NIR can be used within the sugar beet industry, it needs to have a sugar beet application. In in other words, you need intelligence alongside the machine. 

Sugar beet, however, has largely been a neglected market because analytical technology suppliers have prioritised other things, such as meat, dairy, grain and wheat flour. Technology companies aren’t focusing on making dedicated sugar beet applications that make it easy for factories to use, perhaps because it’s a small market, or because the sample is difficult to work with. 

That said, we’ve done it with sugar cane so that users get something that works almost out of the box. This is why we’re looking into doing exactly the same for sugar beet. 

NIR technology companies have prioritised other industries, but we want to change this. We want to enable producers to use NIR, because it can save so much time, money and resources. We’re confident that this technology – specifically designed for the challenges of measuring sugar beet samples – will enable factories to see a return on investment within a year or less after a solution is implemented.

How much of the industry could benefit from NIR?
A very low proportion of the sugar beet industry currently uses infrared – easily less than five percent – so there’s a huge untapped potential. 

*www.ISOSUGAR.org, ** CIBE statistics 2022