Staff

Ross Broadfoot is an expert in the sugar processing areas of juice evaporation, sugar crystallisation and centrifuging. He has undertaken extensive research and consultations in these areas, and in energy management in sugar factories. His main strengths are process design, equipment design, process control, strategic planning and troubleshooting. He undertakes consultations in the Australian and overseas sugar industries and is heavily involved in the training of sugar factory staff.

Geoff Kent has over 25 years experience in raw sugar factory research, consulting and training, specialising in cane transport and milling. He is recognised as a leading expert in milling technology.

Dr Kent is Team Leader for Cane Supply and Processing within the Sugar Research & Innovation group of Queensland University of Technology´s Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities. He is responsible for much of QUT´s research, consulting and training activities in cane supply, transport and milling.

Mr Alex Kono is a QUT graduate with a major in Software Development. He has over 5 years of professional experience in the IT field which includes hardware support and maintenance, database analysis, computing and software programming in several languages and environments.

He has experience with PHP, ASP.Net, Java, C/C++, C#, VB, MSSQL and Oracle.

Alex is currently the solo maintainer of the internal SRI website and TOTools, the scheduling software used by traffic officers to facilitate traffic operations at various sugar mills.

Anthony Mann specialises in Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and combustion modelling of boilers. He has over 13 years experience in the sugar industry and is the principal author of over 100 consulting and research reports for Australian and overseas clients. His consultation work includes CFD modelling of boiler design modifications for reduced tube erosion, prevention of dew point corrosion, improved combustion performance and reduced emissions.

He is also extensively involved in boiler testing and troubleshooting, training courses for sugar factory personnel and modelling of pollutant emissions. Over the last 13 years he has worked on a range of research projects in areas such as bagasse boiler combustion, gasification, pneumatic cane cleaning and self heating of bagasse stockpiles.

Floren Plaza has twenty-one years experience in the sugar industry. Nineteen of those years are in research, design and consulting, with two years in reliability and maintenance of boilers. Dr Plaza has extensive experience in improving the performance of equipment through combined field measurements and computer modelling, including Computational Fluid Dynamics and Structural Analysis.

Dr Plaza has extensive experience on bagasse boilers, including performance measurements and minimising maintenance problems such as convection bank and airheater tube wear, airheater corrosion, and dust emissions.

Mr Rackemann has over 10 years experience in undertaking R&D and consulting for the cane sugar production industry and has a Masters in Chemical Engineering from James Cook University (2005) on heat and mass transfer in crystallization unit operations. Over this time he has developed a comprehensive knowledge of the sugar industry in the areas of clarification and filtration technology and evaporation and crystallisation vessel design and operation.

Mr Rackemann has developed CFD modelling tools and knowledge (including multi–phase and multi–component flows) to evaluate process vessel designs. Mr Rackemann is currently conducting research into environmentally friendly and efficient solvolysis processes to target bio-chemical products from lignocellulosics.

Dr Thomas Rainey is a Chemical Engineer with over 10 years of industry and research experience, mainly related to sugar and pulp & paper manufacturing.

Tom has considerable experience in the manufacture of highly value–added products from agricultural fibres, most notably pulp and paper products from bagasse. He has experience with a wide range of biomass fractionation and pre–treatment technologies as a precursor to value–added lignin products, fuel as well as paper pulp. He also has experience in porous media problems involving compressible media. Other research interests include nanofibres, greenhouse gas mitigation strategies and thermochemical conversion technologies.