Harvesting of both cane and sugar beet is done primarily by machine, or done by hand. The harvested cane stalks and beets are loaded mechanically into trucks or railroad cars and taken to mills for processing into raw sugar. Once there, they are cleaned, washed, milled to extract juice, filtered, and purified. The result is a clear, sugar-filled juice.
After being purifed, the clear juice undergoes vacuum evaporation to remove most of the water. In this process, four vacuum-boiling cells are arranged in series so that each succeeding cell has a higher vacuum. The vapors from one body can thus boil the juice in the next one, a method called multiple-effect evaporation. Next, the syrupy solution is vacuum-crystallized to form sugar crystals. The remaining liquid is removed using centrifugaling and drying, and the sugar is packaged.
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