Abstract
Oil palm loose fruit have always been part of oil palm harvesting operation. The current manual loose fruit collection by hand picking or raking is contributing to the minimum productivity and large amounts of debris. Effort in future shall be explored for the potential machine or system to collect the loose fruit in the field with the result of clean loose fruit. A new machine for loose fruit collection is being developed and examined which knows as Integrated Oil Palm Loose Fruit Collection Machine for collecting loose fruit from the palm base. Consist of three main integrated stages; the suction stage is used to collect the loose fruit, followed by segregating stage, which used to segregate the loose fruit from debris through double layer rotating drum and unloading stage of loose fruit to the 3-4 metric tons bin by using hydraulic tipping cylinder. Result indicates that at least more than 50% productivity of loose fruit collection were increased. In addition, the clean loose fruit collection resulted with the debris less than 10%. Hence, with this development, better quality loose fruits are collected with minimum debris for further processing in the palm oil mill, which will contribute to better oil extraction rate.
Highlights
Malaysia is a major global palm oil producer in the world with a planted area of 5.64 million hectares in 2015
The oil palm industry practices rely on the harvesting process whereby the loose fruit (LF) collection is main part of harvesting process
Results indicated that at least more than 50% productivity of integrated oil palm loose fruit collector (ILFC) was collected compared to manual collection
Summary
Malaysia is a major global palm oil producer in the world with a planted area of 5.64 million hectares in 2015. For the Malaysia gross domestic product (GDP) performance, the oil palm industry contributed approximately RM60-RM70 billion in 2015 and this is expected to increase to RM178 billion by 2020 [1,2,3]. This performance greatly influenced by the oil palm industry practices. The LF collection contributed to the highest amount of oil provided it should not be contaminated by debris and proper managed collected [4,5,6]. As far as the LF collection is concerned, the more the LF collected, not be contaminated and proper managed, the higher OER can be generated, which result the higher lost income can be save
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