Wood Splitting Machine for Tea and Bakery Industries

Abstract

In Sri Lanka, firewood is regarded as a common conventional fuel, mainly in food preparation purposes. Essentially due to economically availability, firewood has still been using as the main source to lit fire in rural areas. Other than for household food preparation, firewood is still the main source of generating heat in food related rural industries, such as tea factories, bakeries, hotels etc. In tea factories and in some of the bakeries, firewood is used in mass scales. Even tons of fire wood is used in each of them, per day. To make easy burning, the wood logs need to be cut in to small pieces. In almost all such places, wood splitting is done manually. It finds very difficult to split wood logs by using an axe. This needs time and more manpower. On the other hand, an additional cost is involved for workers’ payment. If the wood splitting can be mechanized, it may be huge beneficial for such industries as tea factories and bakeries etc. Therefore, this project is aimed to introduce a wood splitting machine, which has the specific objectives of efficient supply of usable level firewood at a shorter time with lower cost and without much manpower to split firewood logs. Lower maintenance requirement together with lower failure frequencies may be added advantages, when compared to the hydraulic devices [4].