Technopulp Industrial Ltda
Project from PIPE’s first group of businesses results in three patent requests for company focused on the sugar & alcohol sector

Lívia Komar

In June of 1997, a newspaper article caught the attention of the Argentine chemical engineer Pedro Gustavo Córdoba. The Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (State of São Paulo Research Foundation, Fapesp) had just created the Programa Inovação Tecnológica em Pequenas Empresas (Technology Innovation in Small Businesses Program, PIPE), with the goal of generating a credit line to fund innovating projects of enterprising businessmen. The owner of Technopulp Industrial, a company headquartered in Ribeirão Preto, in the State of São Paulo, saw there an opportunity for improving a device that could be useful to the sugar & alcohol industry he had been studying since the 1990s.

With the help of his son and also chemical engineer Pedro Gustavo Córdoba Filho, he submitted a project to Fapesp and got funding for his idea. In 2000, the filter Vacuum Press (VP), for sugar and alcohol mills, was launched in the market as one of the first 30 projects funded by PIPE.

First, Indústrias Matarazzo

Córdoba Sr. arrived in Brazil in 1970 to manage the Department of Paper and Cellulose of the Indústrias Matarazzo, then one of Brazil’s largest industrial conglomerates. In 1974, however, he turned his life around and created Technopulp Industrial, in the region that, even back then, was already the State’s main sugar and alcohol producing area. For four years the company kept its focus on the paper & cellulose sector; but prosperity came after 1978 with the Proálcool, the program set up by the Brazilian government in the 1970s, after the first oil shock, to replace oil for alcohol. At that time the company began to advance in the sugar & alcohol sector, at first manufacturing equipment such as purifiers and refiners for sugar and alcohol mills. Then came the filters, which have since become the company’s main product. But in spite of its focus on sugar and alcohol mills, Technopulp also supplies filters to the mining, fertilizer and juice markets, in addition to the paper & cellulose industry.

In 33 years, the company has jumped from US$ 500,000 in annual revenues and ten employees to its current US$ 10 million in annual revenues and 60 employees. The company’s specialty is juice purification in industrial plants. “PIPE has helped us enlarge Technopulp. Entering the market became easier with that loan. Now we have tripled our industrial area,” says Córdoba Sr., the company owner, who doubles as its technical director. The company occupies two buildings in Ribeirão Preto – one, for the administration, in the downtown area; the other, in the city outskirts, with 8,000 square meters (86,100 sq. ft.) and a vast production capacity, is where the Research & Development Department operates. The company has representatives in Brazil and all over South America.

Difficulties

In 1990 Technopulp already strived for innovation. Thanks to Córdoba Sr.’s experience in the area of paper and cellulose, it developed a filter for sugar and alcohol mills using the basic principles of the cellulose washers for paper manufacturing, which use a vacuum washing system. That’s how the first prototype of the company’s main product came to be – and was later improved with PIPE’s funding.

Mills that produce sugar from sugarcane juice must use a filtering system so that there will be no impurities left in the final product. Technopulp’s equipment replaces the rotating filter, which has been used in the sugar industry for more than a century and, in spite of being the only alternative in the market, is not very efficient and wastes tons of sugar each harvest.

So in 1992 Technopulp had three of its filters operating in mills of the Ribeirão Preto area. But producers were afraid of investing in new products because of the crisis that Brazil’s sugar & alcohol industry was going through at the time. For that reason the company was unable to improve the equipment, and the production of the filters remained stalled until, five years later, Fapesp funds came and made possible more detailed studies in a pilot plant set up for essays and tests.

The filter that was developed with PIPE’s support

For the development of the VP the company got from Fapesp US$ 124,000. With the money, it set up a laboratory and a pilot plant at the Diamante Mill, in the municipality of Jaú, also in the State of São Paulo, where the solution could be tested and needed improvements made. Technopulp invested US$ 52,000 of its own resources in the project. With the loan, the company was able to correct problems in the draining time, for example, which in turn made possible mechanic improvements and in the setting up process.

The innovating equipment, entirely projected by Technopulp, entered the market with full force. It filters the garapa, as the sugarcane juice is called in Portuguese, through two polyester screens. That takes place after the decanting process, which separates the juice, which has already been heated and treated, in two parts, called lodo (mire), darker and heavier, and caldo claro (clear juice). The lodo goes to the bottom of the decanters and holds most of the sucrose. The equipment filters precisely that organic matter. What’s new in Technopulp’s filter is the fact that it combines the stages of draining, washing and pressing. In the regular rotating filters, the washing step is absent. But it is this stage, VP’s differential, that the retention of impurities is maximized. In the conventional process most of the sugar that is still left in the lodo ends up in the torta (pie), which is the pressed mixture of all the impurities that are left after the filtering process. In the case of the VP filter, the torta is 35% smaller than the pie generated with rotating filters.

“Without a filtering system – no matter the technology it uses – we’d waste all the sugar in the decanters’ lodo. There’s no question that the equipment increases the plant’s efficiency,” declares the agronomy engineer Roberto Avalloni de Morais, processes supervisor of the Santa Adélia Mill, of the municipality of Jaboticabal, also in the State of São Paulo, which has used Technopulp’s system since the last two harvests.

Avoiding the competition

VP filters also solve a common problem the mills have. Rotating filters, which are still widely used, need to be constantly cleaned, and thus the mills have to stop frequently for maintenance. Technopulp’s equipment, according to the company, requires less technical care because it is easily cleaned.

The company’s team lists several other advantages of VP filters compared to conventional ones. “A rotating filter weights 40 tons, whereas Technopulp’s weights just eight tons. Rotating filters waste 4% of the sugar in the torta. Our average is 1.5%. In a single harvest Technopulp’s filter recovers approximately 10,000 50-kilo (110 lbs) bags of sugar from the torta,” estimates Fernando Ricci Molina, a designer at Technopulp’s Department of Mechanical Engineering who has worked in the company for 15 years and has followed its accomplishments. Another advantage, according to Molina, is the price. Traditional filters require an investment of US$ 450,000; Technopulp’s costs US$ 180,000. “The mill gets back its investment in the same harvest the equipment is installed,” assures the designer.

Out of the PIPE-financed project, two more filters

The company sells about 60 Vacuum Press filters per year. Each of them processes between 3,000 and 8,000 tons of crushed sugarcane a day. Technopulp has already set up some 380 VP filters in mills throughout Latin America. The patent request was deposited in 1993, according to the National Institute of Intellectual Property (Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial, INPI)’s homepage; but the patent hasn’t been given yet. With the conclusion of the project funded through PIPE, in 2000, the knowledge acquired made possible for the company to develop two other filters for mills, both of which with patent requests deposited in 2005 and 2006 respectively. One of them, called Vacuum Belt, is used for filtering clarified juice, syrup and liqueurs in mills; the other, called Filtro Horizontal Vacuum Belt (Vacuum Belt Horizontal Filter), filters the mire that results from the treatment of the water used for washing the mills’ soot system. According to Córdoba Sr., they are efficient alternatives in many ways, such as their small size, reduced energy consumption and operational simplicity. VP filters, however, are still the most demanded. Following a market trend, Technopulp is now looking for partnerships with mills in order to start a new project for filtering biodiesel, a fuel produced from the chemical reaction of vegetable oils extracted from various raw materials.

For Córdoba Sr., Technopulp’s success is not a coincidence. “The secret is to have a lot of responsibility and technological knowledge. It’s essential to be familiar with the market and to know the production process. It’s also important to form a good team, well-trained and up-to-date,” he lists. He also says that the company believes that it has to reward somehow those who made possible its development, and is now offering frequent courses to its employees. That, according to Technopulp, should bring significant advances for the sugar & alcohol industry.