Mechanical Design and Evaluation of Kapok Fibre Seeds Separator

Abstract

The demand on Kapok fibre-based products has currently shown an increase particularly those from small business traders in comparison to massive market sellers due to lower cost offered. However, the small business traders commonly use manual technique to separate the Kapok fibre from its seed before continuing to the next stages, thus, leading to labour-intensive work, longer processing time, and low output. The aim of the study was to design and develop a Kapok fibre seeds separator to efficiently perform the work. A number of idea generation and concept development phases were undertaken. The finalised concept was the transformed into a three-dimensional (3-D) model using a computer-aided design (CAD) software. A computational 3-D finite element analysis (FEA) was conducted to evaluate the structural performance under simulated loadings. Also, the product prototype was built and its usability has been tested. The outcomes of 3-D FEA showed that the highest mechanical stress recorded within the structure was favourable with low tendency towards failure. Whilst, the results of usability testing demonstrated that the proposed product reported an increase of 52.8% in the amount of separated seeds. Thus, the new design of Kapok fibre seeds separator is found to be superior in solving the problems issued by the manual processing technique.