Selection of sustainable juice extraction techniques for noncentrifugal sugar industry using multi-criteria decision-makingmethods

摘要

Non-centrifugal sugar (NCS) industry is one of the oldest small-scale cottage industries in India, with crude and inferior production techniques. Toward transforming these inferior techniques for the sustenance of NCS industry, it is necessary to select sustainable methods among the existing technologies at various stages in the production process. In the production of NCS, juice extraction is the primary and essential process. The present article gives an insight in selecting a sustainable juice extraction technology using various decision approaches. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is the decision approaches used for selecting the appropriate juice extraction technique among 6 alternatives based on 11 criteria covering various sustainable factors. Through this MCDM approach, it was obtained that crusher with single horizontal roller that uses electrical motor without any usage of hot water is the most sustainable juice extraction method for NCS production in plant mode with 1.38 group priority weight. On the other hand, crusher with single vertical roller that runs on electrical energy without usage of hot water and crusher with single horizontal roller that runs on diesel engines without the usage of hot water is a comparatively least preferred alternative for NCS production with 3.33 and 3.39 group priority weight, respectively.Practical ApplicationsThis article narrates the novel work undertaken to identify a sustainable crushing technology for extracting sugarcane juice to produce non-centrifugal sugar.The analysis is carried out to select the most appropriate technology among 6 crushing technologies based on 11 evaluation criteria spreading across various aspects of sustainability.The analysis used three multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods namely TOPSIS, PROMETHEE, and VIKOR.Based on this analysis it is found that single horizontal crusher that run on electricity without the use of hot water (SHEN) is the best juice extraction technology.Hence, this technology could be used by the non-centrifugal sugar (NCS) industry to produce NCS in a sustainable way.Further, the methodology presented in this article, demonstrates the use of such methods to identify the better processes/subprocesses to produce NCS in a sustainable way.