Sugar Australia’s Yarraville Refinery in Melbourne is Australia’s longest-established sugar refinery. Sugar refining has been conducted on the site since 1873. Many modifications have been made to the site and process over the years to provide efficient and highly-automated production and packaging of a broad range of refined sugar products. Recent negotiations between Sugar Australia and Stevco Seals & Pumps Victoria has resulted in Stevco being awarded a tender to supply and commission a second replacement pump-set to upgrade the 100-year-old water injection system.
Sugar uses sea water pumped straight from the mouth of the Maribyrnong River for injection in their vacuum system. The original pumps installed for this duty were bronze horizontal split casing units built at Worthington’s Bedford works in the UK in 1910.
Over the years spares availability had ceased and with changes in demand these units became extremely costly to maintain. Lack of parts availability necessitating re-engineering and fabricating of components such as impellers and shafts, along with deterioration of the housings and an antiquated pulley & belt drive system, finally coerced management at Sugar to replace the existing pumps with more modern technology.
Capable of supplying sea water at a constant rate of 416L/s at 21 metre head, the Duplex Stainless steel Sulzer ScanPump BE4060-55 pump is driven by a 132kW, 8 pole high efficiency WEG electric motor controlled by VFD.
Stray current from the rotor is being diverted by an INPRO® CDR (current diverter ring). This assures that the current does not damage bearing races when passing down to earth.
Stevco built and installed the first of these new pump sets in mid 2007 and after 5 years of proven operation the decision was made to replace the remaining original pump with the same specification of ScanPump and motor.
The second new pump is being manufactured by Sulzer ScanPump in Sweden and fabrication of the new base and hardware is about to get underway at Stevco. Planned installation is set for December 2012.
About the Sugar Australia Yarraville Refinery
- Raw sugar for the Yarraville refinery is sourced from Queensland where it has been milled from Australian -grown sugar cane. The main sugar refining processing steps at Yarraville are: dissolving and heating to 82oC, clarification by phosphatation, deep bed filtration, decolourisation over granular activated carbon, crystallisation, separation of crystals from syrup by centrifuging, drying, crystal size classification by sieving, and then packaging.
- A substantial amount of refined sugar is delivered to customers in bulk road tankers in both crystal and liquid form.
- The Yarraville Refinery can produce up to 300,000 tonnes per annum.
- The benefit of the location of the Yarraville refinery in Melbourne is its proximity to some of the major food manufacturing industries in Australia which use refined sugar as an ingredient, and the site’s access to wharf facilities on the Maribyrnong River for receiving bulk raw sugar.
