Physico-Chemical Characteristics of White Sugar Fractions Separated by Crystal Sizes

Abstract

According to the EU Council Directive 2001/111/EC, related to certain sugars intended for human consumption, a great attention is paid to color in sugar. On the other hand, the non-sucrose compounds having intensive color tend to build into the sucrose crystals. Since Serbia has to work on the new rules concerned sugar quality and harmonization with EU standards, some investigations on sugar crystals are carried out at the request of some sugar factories. Investigations are carried out on sugar crystal size dependence on sugar color and on dissolution rate of different sugar crystal size fractions with the aim to create new sugar products. In this study, sugar samples with different sugar color are divided into 5 fractions by crystal size, defining size distributions. In each fraction the color in solution and the type of color are measured, as well as other relevant physico-chemical parameters. The conclusion is that the sugar color type depends on the crystal size, but sugar crystal solution is not dependent on crystal size except a fraction smaller than 200 mm, which has 30-75% higher sugar color in solution than the other crystal size fractions.