THE CUBA REVIEW 



29 



Central Delicias — Vacuum Pan Floor in Operation. 



installation for erection and repair purposes. Both a hot and a cold maceration water 

 service is fitted and provided with meters for accurate working. In a convenient posi- 

 tion in the mill house there is a large-gauge board for the pressure gauges of high, low, 

 exhaust steam, and vacuum, as well as recording instruments for the same. The 

 bagasse is conveyed to the furnaces by motor-driven conveyors, the boilers being lo- 

 cated in a continuation of the mill houses. There are twenty multitubular boilers seven 

 feet diameter by twenty feet long working at 125 pounds pressure, divided into two 

 batteries of ten each and fitted with green bagasse furnaces of the step-grate pattern. 

 The boilers are carried on steel columns outside the brick work, so that the furnace 

 walls have no weight to carry. Two of the boilers are fitted with coal-burning furnaces 

 for raising steam and are idle during the crop. The products of combustion are carried 

 off by two steel self-supporting stacks on concrete foundations, ten feet diameter by 

 one hundred and eighty feet high above floor level, the flues being lined with brick. 

 Railway tracks are laid down in the boiler houses for the supply of fuel and the removal 

 of ashes. The scraper carriers and the revolving furnace feeders are also driven by 

 electric motors. 



The juice after leaving the mills is pumped up into the juice weighers (two for each 

 set of mills), consisting of a pair of tanks, each on a registering weigh beam. The 

 juice then goes to the liming tanks, the lime being admitted into the tanks during filling, 

 each tank provided with a coil for compressed air for thoroughly mixing tlie juice. The 

 defecation plant is of the open-tank type with the usual steam coil in the bottom. The 

 juice is first heated by passing it through a battery of five steam-heated heaters, cither 

 direct or exhaust steam being used. There is ample scum-tank and filter-press capacity. 

 All the cloths from the latter are washed in rotary washers, driven through shafting by 

 an electric motor. The filter-press mud is discharged into screw conveyors driven by an 

 electric motor. The various juice and filter-press pressure pumps are steam driven. 



Two sets of standard quadruple efi^ects have been in.stallcd, each of 21.000 square feet 

 of heating surface, with its separate counter-current jet condenser. The evaporator* 

 and pans are connected by the same air line to the dry-air piunps, of which there are 

 two of large size, both steam driven. In service only one is used, which easily maintains 

 a steady vacuum of 27 inches. Five thirteen-fect pans have been put in, three calnndria 

 and two coil pans, to work either exhaust or direct steam. Each pan has its motor- 

 driven auxiliary dry-air pump for raising the vacuum to a .suitable lieiglit before cutting 

 in the pan on the main air line to avoid heavy fluctuations of the vacuum, and its sepa- 

 rate counter-current jet condenser, the hot weJls of which discharge into the main drain- 

 age canal running through the factory. On tlie floor below the pans n^c located the 



