Publication: Design and analysis of power saw for palm oil harvester
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Date
2023-06-23
Authors
Yee, Tian Soon
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Abstract
The reciprocating saw is one of the power saws that can be used in the oil palm industry to harvest the fruit bunches below three meters height of the oil palm trees. However, the heavy design of the power saw required a better design of saw blades with reduced cutting force to improve the productivity to collect fruit bunches and reduce the fatigue of the workers. The objectives of the study were to study the effect of the blade geometry of different saw blade design, to evaluate which aspects of geometry plays an important role in reducing cutting force, and to propose a better design of a blade geometry that is suitable for cutting oil palm fronds and its fruit bunches. The experiment used a 1.3kg reciprocating saw, WORX WG894E with two different designs of blades: steel cutting blade (B1) and wood cutting blade (B2) to cut two types of oil palm fronds: dry frond (F1) and green frond (F2) with different moisture content to analysis the cutting force of both blades. After the experiment, the measurement result of cutting force shows that the dry frond required less cutting force compared to the green frond, where the parallel force, Fx of the dry frond is 27.14% of the green frond, and the normal force, Fy of the dry frond is the 71.43% of the green
frond. While the steel cutting blade (B1) used less cutting force compared to the wood cutting force (B2), where the parallel force, Fx and normal force, Fy of the wood cutting blade is 107% and 116% of the steel cutting blade, respectively. In general, the result suggests that the suitable design of the saw blade to cut the oil palm frond is the blade with less TPI (3 – 6), with a larger tooth height (3.00 mm – 4.00 mm), and thicker blade (1.25 mm – 1.5 mm) to increase the material removal rate and reduce the cutting time, the rake angle should be less negative or zero (-11° – 0°) to reduce the cutting force and energy consumption required to cut the oil palm fronds.