Investigation of machinability of klein dried oil palm wood with regard to production of solid wood products

Oil Palm Wood (OPW) a by-product of the oil palm industry has become an increasingly important raw material due to large quantity of availability and the lack of traditional wood species in many parts of the world. Extensive studies and projects have found uses of OPW for products with high economic potential. A study suggests that palm wood, when used for wooden products, has a significant advantage of lower Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions during production process as compared to wood from conventional sources. Despite these promising facts and results, the lack of use of OPW on an industrial scale is mainly because of its difficultness to machine, due to high variance in density distribution and extremely abrasive nature due to the presence of silica particles. This study aims on detailed observation and analysis of machining techniques of OPW. And as a result to create product oriented machining solutions with optimized cutting tools and machining processes. A series of machining operations were performed to evaluate possibilities of planing, routing, sawing, drilling and boring. Findings of this study showed that cutting material, cutting edge geometry and cutting dynamics play a vital role in tool wear mechanism while machining OPW. Significant effects of defective drying process in terms of pre splitting and tear outs were observed for different machining processes. Influence of chip formation and chip arc length for these consequences in compliance to the morphology of the material was identified. It was also found that the abrasiveness of OPW with high moisture content is remarkably lower than OPW with low moisture content. These results would benefit to overcome the difficulties in machining OPW, developing or optimizing machining processes, determining cutting material, cutting geometry and tool life.