Design and Simulation for Automated Wood Plank Sorting System

Ng, Choo Er (2022) Design and Simulation for Automated Wood Plank Sorting System. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Malaysia timber industry has helped economic growth in Malaysia especially for the furniture sub-sector with their RM9.83 billion furniture exports in 2018. Over the years, there are some challenges faced by the industry notably during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. To tackle the challenges, Malaysian Timber Council (MTC) has set up a financial incentive for machinery, to encourage automation in timber industry to maintain the quality of sawmilling and manufacturing of value-added wood-based products, boost productivity and minimize labour working in the industry. However, most existing machinery found in the global market are for wood plank sawing and stacking. For wood plank sorting, the wooden plank is usually trimmed to the same length or having the same thickness before proceeding to sorting. Thus, most existing wood plank sorting machines are suitable for wood planks with fixed dimensions, but not applicable to sort wood planks with varying length. This case applies to furniture industry where manual labour is still required to monitor and classify the wood planks with different sizes accordingly. Additionally, the sorted planks need to be arranged manually to ease the transportation of the forklift. Sorting and arranging these wood planks manually are time consuming and will further reduce the work efficiency. In this project, a wood plank sorting system will be designed to sort wood plank with varying length according to their width and thickness at the same time ease the transportation of sorted planks using forklift to reduce the amount of workforce working in the industry. Material selection and material cost analysis will be done using CES Edupack software and a 3D drawing together with motion and strength analysis will be performed using Solidworks software to prove the reliability and workability of the system design. Then, WinSPS-S7 and Factory IO software will be used to programme the system automation flow and to prove the sensor capability to measure the length of an object. The result deduced that the proposed sorting system is capable to sort different sizes of wood plank and the number of workforces can be significantly reduced to only two workers. As with the performance, the design is preferable to be used for smaller scale production for low-cost sorter that does not require high speed sorting.