CFA01 Cane Fibre Analyser

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The Jeffco Cane Fibre Analyser automatically removes all non fibre components from a 500g sugar cane sample. Used in Australia for over 30 years for sugarcane quality payment systems the method used by the CFA has a repeatability of +/- 0.29 units of fibre. Simply shred the sugarcane sample using a Jeffco Cutter Grinder, add the shredded sample to the CFA sample can, fit the can into the CFA and press the start button.  The CFA will wash out all sugars and solubles, dry the sample to constant dry weight and let you know it is finished. Simply weight the fibre plug, and calculate fibre against the sample starting weight to obtain cane%fibre. Automated, integrated processing removes almost all manual labour. The diffusion method is reported to be more repeatable than the ICUMSA method, the press family of methods and the Hamna method (Shi et al, 2023, A new approach to measuring the fibre content of sugarcane, ISSCT proceedings.) Most existing methods require moisture analysis by oven, which can take 24 hours or more to complete.  Press methods which consider the weight of the press sample plug assume 25% hygroscopic water content, and often don’t take account of imbibition coefficient or dry milling factor. The result is long laborious and indirect fibre analysis, reliant on significant handling by operators, incorrect assumptions about the brix in the sample plug being the same as the brix in expressed juice and factored calculations. CFA is a direct measurement alternative, reducing analysis time for a fibre result to less than 2 hours per sample, removing human handling and all assumptions. 

Increasing mechanization of harvesting sugarcane and similar crops has increased the delivery of trash, dirt, soil, stones, sand and gravel with the sugarcane. These crop components cost money to transport to the factory, are damaging to factory equipment and processes, absorb sugar as losses, and has an increasing cost as waste disposal.