Sweetness is Business

Seems yesterday's activity was quite interesting in my engineering study. There was a site visit at Central Sugar Refinery(CSR) which is a second-largest sugar supplier in Malaysia. Located at Batu Tiga, Shah Alam this sugar refinery is quite sophisticated in term of processing the raw sugar into the real sugar that can be used. It took around 45minutes to arrive there from Monash University (and after long time waiting at the guard house)....As we arrived there, a short briefing was made - explaining about the whole process of making sugar product which was distributed nationwide at the major stores like Tesco, Mydin, Giant etc.. The raw sugar were imported from Australia..quite weird there..why don't we use our local raw sugar? perhaps it would be cheaper.. . . Entering the 'machines house' of the CSR, we can see sugar everywhere - even at our foot! My shoe become 'sticky' as I walk into the factory. The athmosphere also changed - I it smell sweet-like in the factory are - like you are putting your nose near a melted sugar, that's how I can describe it.  Now's the real story of making sugar. We were introduced to Mr...mm.forgot his name who guided us through the whole process. There are seven major steps in processing the sugar...affination,carbonation & filteration, absorption, evaporation & crystallisation, separation, drying,cooling & screening and finally packaging. Now we knew that processing sugar not just drying it to the sun - like making salt.hehe. Even it was damn hot right there, the process tour was really interesting - looking at the gigantic processing machines and complicated steps of processing..I couldn't wait to step into the real world of engineering.hehe. And the very disgusting part is -No camera is allowed in the factory area! But still we took some pictures using a 'secret' technique.Credit to Acap for his sophisticated C905. After half an hour roaming in the 'house of machines', we were guided back to the briefing area for QnA session - that time I felt very tired and just hear the QnA session. Well, that visit was really interesting and I felt very thankful to CSR and Monash Uni for this nice visit.

And here are the 'prohibited' pics =)

The front gate of CSR.

Tanks.

Conveyor belt - to moves sugar produst to another place rapidly.

Pipes.