INULIN’S PRODUCTION FROM AGAVE WASTE

Abstract

Agave “pineapples” represent a waste from the Cuban agave industry that causes economic
losses due to its unused inulin content. Also, environment is affected because that waste isn’t
processed before discarding. For that, the objective of this work is, to propose a procedure to
obtain inulin industrially from henequen pineapple, using process simulation. For the simulation
of an inulin production plant, which processes 1 000 kg of henequen pineapples per hour, the
SuperPro Designer v13.0 program was used. The base case was analyzed and four alternatives
were proposed. The simulation model was verified by comparing the result of some parameters
obtained in the laboratory such as the final humidity in the product (5 %) and %) the inulin
content in the concentrated juice (35 %) with a maximum relative error of 6 %. The alternatives
were evaluated and compared with the base case according to the unit production cost, cost of
the auxiliary services, and investment recovery time. The composition of the product obtained
was compared. The alternative for which the flow of raw material was doubled and the inulin
composition in the henequen pineapples was increased was the best, reducing the investment
recovery time in relation to the base case from 4.7 to 2 years, as well as the unit production cost
($/kg) from 16.97 to 5.89.