A quantum leap in sugarbeet analysis

Time is of the essence for Stefan Meldau and his colleague Elke Hilscher. The Business Development Manager and the chemist have to be at their next consulting appointment at a German sugar factory in half an hour. The two KWS employees have been traveling around Germany and the world for some 24 months. Their mission: “To increase awareness of KWS’ latest innovation, the BEETROMETER^® and in particular to persuade the sugar industry of the system’s merits,” says Meldau.

After all, KWS’ new technology has brought about a quantum leap in determining the sugar content of beet, adds the 39-year-old Meldau. “Conventional analysis methods are pretty time-consuming and labor-intensive, but the BEETROMETER^® we’ve developed is a device that can determine the sugar content of beet in 20 seconds down to an accuracy of two decimal places – fully automatically,” states Elke Hilscher, the co-inventor of the BEETROMETER^®, with pride.

Sugar content varies greatly

And she has every right to be proud – the experienced chemist and her team ventured into a particularly complex field when they began research into measuring beet quality 16 years ago. “The general difficulty is being able to measure the sugar content of beet precisely,” she explains. It may vary by up to seven or eight percent between individual beets – and differences of up to three percent are possible within a beet. “The big challenge for sugar manufacturers to date has therefore been to ascertain how much sugar is in a beet batch with a high degree of accuracy.”

KWS’ new technology simplifies processes in quality analysis enormously. The recipe for success: Instead of large quantities of sugarbeet being pulped and homogenized, followed by removal and freezing of sub-samples and analysis of them in the lab, the BEETROMETER^® examines beets in a matter of seconds. They are first shredded evenly and compacted on a conveyor belt. The surface is then analyzed with a near-infrared (NIR) spectrometer.

More precise analysis than previous methods

“A spectrum is recorded every 40 milliseconds,” says Hilscher to explain the process. “The sugar content is ultimately determined by the intensity of the absorbed light.” The major advantage: Just a single sample is measured 400 times in 20 seconds and therefore the sample cannot change in that short time. “That means the sample’s entire heterogeneity is captured and accuracy is increased,” says the chief chemist in summarizing the benefits.

Hilscher and her team developed the first prototype of the BEETROMETER^® from 2004 to 2009 in close cooperation with KWS’ engineers under the leadership of Frank Friedhoff. Since then, the system has been used on nine harvesters as part of sugarbeet breeding. “And now we’re discussing the BEETROMETER^® system with the sugar industry worldwide, because my U.S. colleague Duane Bernhardson believes the beet processing industry can benefit from this technology just as much as we do,” she says.

The first customer, American Crystal Sugar Company in the United States, is already using six of the devices successfully in its factory. “The close collaboration in the past three years between Duane Bernhardson and his colleagues at Betaseed and the teams from the Chemistry and Technology departments in Germany was vital to the successful market launch of the BEETROMETER^®,” adds Elke Hilscher.

Further projects with other sugar factories have already been initiated. “They get positive feedback from users and potential customers,” confirms Stefan Meldau, adding that it is foreseeable that many sugar factories switch to using the BEETROMETER^® system long term.