Effect of Blade Geometries, Blade Amount, and Feed Direction on Palm Cutting Chip of Orbital Cutting Blade Palm Chopping Machine

Abstract

One of important factors for increasing palm productivity is an palm residue management. Some palm tree residues such as palm branch and leaf were always cut to small size and then utilized as a fertilizer or a hoof food in a rural area. Therefore, a palm chopping method for utilizing a palm residue was always conducted and developed continuously. This article aimed to select an optimized cutting blade shape, blade amount, and feed direction for cutting a palm branch by an orbital cutting blade palm chopping machine. In this experiment, the designed cutting blades that were produced by a specified condition, were applied for cutting the palm branch using a specified cutting condition. The summarized results are as follows. The cutting lade that made of carbon steel should not apply the tempering after the hardening because it affected to decrease hardness and cutting edge wear. The semi-V cutting blade showed the higher wear resistance and hardness than that of the V cutting blade and indicated hardness of 481 HV and weight loss of 6.24%. The semi-V cutting blade produced higher and larger palm chopping scrap than that of the V cutting blade and could produce the scrap of 3878 g at the cutting speed of 1200 rpm. Increase of the cutting blade amount affected to increase the palm cutting efficiency such as the increase of scrap amount, the decrease of scrap dimension, and the decrease of operation time.  Feed direction that inclined to the horizontal axis could decrease a friction force and cutting force between the cutting edge and palm surface and also assisted easily to feed the palm branch.