Design and development of small-scale oil palm waste shredder for achieving technical, economic and environmental sustainability

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of an economically and technically feasible small-scale oil palm waste shredder. Oil palm waste management has always been a serious issue for palm oil industry in South East Asia. Poor waste management contributes to environmental problem and hence reducing consumers’ confidence in palm oil products. It was found that most available oil palm waste shredders are unaffordable due to high initial investment cost, large, heavy and unportable, which have been the drawbacks for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to participate in oil palm waste management industry. To rectify the situation, a low cost and small-scale oil palm waste shredder is introduced in this paper. Based on Quality Function Deployment (QFD) results, the main design concept deduced is to compromise acceptable efficiency with affordable price by integrating all mandatory components of oil palm waste shredder into a comparatively small and portable support structure. The innovations made in the modified design are: 2 to 3 multiples of size reduction, adoption of double-shafts cutters with 7 jaws technology, installation of oil palm fibre and waste juice collecting system and deployment of a portable machinery base equipped with caster wheels. Preliminary calculations supported the conceptual design which consists of torque generated from 5.5kW electric motor connected to a ZQ500 reducing gearbox. The cutting force produced is expected up to 19.45kN, which has a safety factor of 4.5 as compared to the maximum compression strength of oil palm fronds (OPFs) which is only 4.351kN. This conceptual design is expected to be able to handle other oil palm wastes like empty fruit bunches (EFBs) as oil palm fronds (OPF) are generally harder than other oil palm wastes.