Effect of factory reliability on bagasse usage and surplus

Poor factory reliability increases season length, reduces sugar production and reduces the supply of bagasse available for cogeneration and the production of by-products. The financial justification for capital expenditure, maintenance and control system upgrades usually account for the extended season length and lost sugar production associated with stoppages. However, the extra bagasse use due to stoppages is often harder to quantify, and, therefore, the resulting financial consequences are often not considered. This work attempts to quantify the effects of stoppages on bagasse use in factories so that the true costs of factory stoppages can be more accurately determined. Factory data have been used to predict the effects of long and short factory stops on bagasse consumption and surpluses. Calculations were carried out for a factory data set with a relatively small number of short stops and a factory data set with a large number of short stops. For both data sets, far more bagasse was lost due to short stops than long stops, and the quantity of bagasse consumed due to short stops represents a significant loss of revenue. Stops disrupt and increase the bagasse consumption of the boiler station in ways that are difficult to model, so it is likely that the calculations in this work underestimate the bagasse consumption and, therefore, revenue lost due to stops.