Author(s)

L. M. Gan, H. L. Gan, A. B. Rosli

Abstract

As acknowledged, biomass has been identified as the most promising alternative for replacing fossil fuel due to its sustainability. Grinding is known to be essential to reduce the size of biomass samples in order to produce products with enhanced strength and durability. Some of the commonly used devices include a hammer mill and a knife mill. Bearing in mind the importance of such apparatus, a piece of grinding equipment has been designed and fabricated. However, the first prototype of the grinding facility resulted in irregular shape and sizes of the specimens, and consequently reduced the quality of the ground products obtained. This phenomenon therefore prompted the necessity to design a new facility. This paper thus discusses the development of the improved version of the grinding facility from the existing one through the incorporation of better functions. The improved version of the facility utilised powerful cutting blades with both shearing and hammering functions, which produced more uniformed and fine particles. A specially designed specimen collector was also added to the facility to reduce dust contamination. The assembled facility was utilised to be tested on biomass resources such as Jatropha fruits and oil palm stems. Through the manipulation of control parameters like cutting speed and operating time, the fineness of the particles could be varied, as appropriate.

Keywords

combined grinding, grinding, biomass, shearing, hammering