Bagasse Ash

Bagasse ash is by-product of sugarcane milling process in sugar factories. Sugarcane is plant that its juice can be processed into sugar. This plant can only grow in tropical regions. Bagasse as byproduct of sugar production has variety of benefits, including: fodder, raw material of fertilizer, raw material of ethyl alcohol, fabric particle board, and raw material of pulp and for fuel of boiler in sugar factory / plant.

In the utilization of bagasse as fuel of boiler in sugar plant process, bagasse is burned to heat water in boiler to produce steam that will be used to drive power plants. From the combustion process will be generated bagasse ash that has gray-black color. If a sugar plant operates 3 boilers need about 51 tons of bagasse per hour, so one day it takes about 1224 tons of bagasse which is used as fuel for these boilers. Assuming bagasse ash has proportion of about 2% of the bagasse, so in one day would be generated about 24.48 tons of bagasse ash in this plant.

Production process that takes place at a sugar plant can be shown simply by the scheme below:

Figure 1: Scheme of Sugarcane Production

From the scheme above, we see that the boilers in that sugar plant are used to drive purifier and evaporator to produce sugar crystals.

From the results of wet chemical analysis it appears that bagasse ash has relatively high silica content, so has prospect to serve as substitute ingredient in mixture of cement concrete. This material is expected to react with calcium hydroxide pozzolanic reaction products of cement hydration to produce calcium silicate hydrate compounds that contribute in increasing the compressive strength of concrete. For comparison, following below are some data of compound composition that has other pozzolanic ingredients.

Table 1: Chemical Composition of Bagasse Ash