Design of a Loading and Sorting System in Timber Industry Using Simulation Software

Kok, Ken Wai (2022) Design of a Loading and Sorting System in Timber Industry Using Simulation Software. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

In sawmill industries, wood planks are cut at bandsaw. Due to the quality of the logs, the sizes of the wood planks may be varies in term of cross section and length. The bundle of wood planks is then sorted by cross section sizes, normally manually by labours. An automated loading and sorting system may help to reduce the amount of labour and time taken to sort the wood planks. This system required to transfer and sort different sizes of wood plank automatically using controller. A loading machine is used to feed a bundles of different sizes of wood planks one by one to the feeding conveyor. The feeding conveyor is then feeds the wood planks to the sorting system. During the transfer time, the sensors on the feeding conveyor detect cross section dimension of the wood planks before entering the sorting system. As for the sorting system, it sorts the wood planks to the desired place based on the dimensions of the wood planks. In this project, a loading and sorting system was developed for sawmill industry using the SolidWorks. The use of the loading and sorting system could potentially reduce the transfer and sorting time of the wood planks to save the labour cost and production time for the industry. The loading and sorting system designed consists of various driven mechanisms to transfer the wood planks in the system through various stations. Moreover, static simulation such as finite element analysis (FEA) and the optimisation of the design to prove the von-Mises stress, displacement, strain and factor of safety is within the acceptable range using Solidworks. Dynamic simulation using the SolidWorks to show the process of how the wood planks is loaded and sorted. A prototype with control system to show the feasibility of sorting mechanism was constructed. The test was carried out on 8 samples given by the company with various combinations has shown encouraging successful results. Dynamic animation of has been animated through Solidworks motion analysis and FEA simulation of hopper of loading machine has been tested using Solidworks simulation. For protoype, 5 sets of preliminary test has been obtained as set 3 and set 5 has succesfully sorted all the wood plank sample to desired bin. 1 set of optimization of prototype result has been obtained and successfully sorted all the wood plank accordingly to desired bin to increase the accuracy of result of wood plank enter the correct bin.