Conserving Bagasse in Jaggery Making

Development of a jaggery making pan to save biomass during jaggery making.

Jaggery making from sugar cane juice is a rural industry that is spread across 10 states of India. Most jaggery making stoves use more fuel than what is available as bagasse after crushing sugarcane. TIDE has developed some fuel-efficient jaggery stove designs but standardization has been difficult because of large variation in the scale of jaggery making operations.

The intervention experimented by TIDE was to increase the surface area of the jaggery pan. It therefore tested a pan with about 2000 small fins welded onto the bottom surface. This increased the surface area of the pan by about 37%. The data collected so far shows that fuel saving of about 40% is possible and the processing time per batch has been reduced by 15 minutes. The response from the local unit has been very positive. The weight of jaggery processed per batch is also higher by about 5%. TIDE is now interacting with various jaggery-making units to motivate them to use a fuel efficient jaggery pan.

Prof. Lokras inspecting modified jaggery pan with fins at the bottom surface