Design and Simulation of an Automated Wood Plank Processing System

Liaw, Owen Ken Hua (2022) Design and Simulation of an Automated Wood Plank Processing System. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

Text OWEN LIAW KEN HUA_ Thesis.pdf Restricted to Registered users only Download (10MB)

Abstract

Timber industry has been the key engine of economic growth for over half a century in Malaysia. Nowadays, the demand for lumber trend has shifted towards quality and quantity rather than in pursuit of the lowest price. Hence, the productivity of the timber industry should be increased to meet the requirement of the consumers. To date, wooden plank quality inspection and size sorting are conducted manually, but they are tedious, slow and repetitive work. Therefore, an automated wooden plank processing system is designed to increase the wood plank productivity and at the same time increase the delivery of consistent inspections and minimize the error made by humans. In this project, SOLIDWORKS is used to construct the 3D modelling and to perform FEA simulation for the analysis of stress, displacement and safety factor of the designed automated timber processing system. Besides that, FLEXSIM, a process flow simulation software, is used to model and analyse the entire process flow of the system to evaluate and verify that the automated system is better than the physical industry (human-operated). The designed automated wood plank processing system consists of the unscramble subsystem, crosscut subsystem, sorting subsystems and conveyor subsystems. The details of each subsystem, for example, the number of components and the motor power and capacity to drive the conveyors and so on are carefully designed. Remarkably, the productivity of the automated production system has improved by about 50.53%, compared to a manually operated system.