CANE SUGAR. 



The essential difference between the Dutch oven and Abel type of furnace 

 is the size of the combustion chamber ; the first furnaces which the writer 

 met with in his experience of the cane sugar industry were of the latter type y 

 and he learnt that these large combustion chambers were thought necessary to 

 obtain a complete combustion of the megass, and to avoid loss through the 

 presence of carbon monoxide in the flue gases ; with more extended experience 

 the writer saw factories with the Dutch 

 oven type of furnace working with extreme 

 fuel economy, and with better results than 

 others where the Abel type was in use. 

 Kadiation from the heated brickwork of 

 the furnace is surely one of the principal 

 sources of heat loss, and being proportional 

 to the exposed area will tend to become 

 very great in furnaces of exaggerated 

 length, which the writer has seen as long 

 as 28 feet from the face plate of the boiler 

 to furnace door; in addition, the greater 

 the mass of brickwork the greater is the 

 opportunity for cold air to leak in through 

 cracks in the masonry. 



Stoking of Megass. In recent 

 factories the megass is fed to the furnaces 

 by schemes mechanically as efficient as 

 those used for automatically firing coal; 

 a diagrammatic view of such a scheme is 

 shown in Fig. 223 ; megass direct from the 

 mill is delivered to a scraper carrier a a ; 

 this carrier is arranged to run in a direction 

 at right angles to furnaces ; over each fur- 

 nace is placed a sheet iron hopper b b and 

 over the mouth of this is a shutter c c, the 

 position of which is controlled from the 

 platform d d by means of a cord; the megass 

 is carried forward by the scrapers e e, the 

 quantity falling into the hopper being 

 controlled by the position of the shutter ; 

 // are two toothed cylinders revolving 

 inwards which serve to feed the megass 



FIG. 221. 



down the shoot; any surplus megass is directed on to the platform dd by 

 the shoot gg and is, when required, fired by hand through the fire box 

 door hh. 



408 



