Development of bamboo splitting machine/ Emmanuel R. Bucatan, Robelyn T. Dacanay, Jerome M. Lazaro, and Christian M. Villar

Thesis (undergraduate) --

College of Industrial Technology: Bachelor of Engineering Technology major in Mechatronics Technology, Technological University of the Philippines, 2022

Includes bibliography

Bamboos are used in the handicraft and furniture industries to make baskets, lamp shades, fans, hats, decorative furniture, and other decorative products. Thinned bamboo strips are used to produce bamboo handicrafts. To produce thinned bamboo strips, the craftsmen are manually splitting the bamboos into thinner pieces. Small-scale production requires the use of manpower to accomplish the full process manually, resulting in a greater workload for workers, which affects both production rate and quality. Also, injuries caused by using hand knives occurs when the knife slips during the cutting or splitting process. Therefore, the risk of using a large knife in preparing the bamboo is also a concern. The general objective of the study is to develop a Bamboo Splitting Machine to improve the manual splitting of the bamboo. This was achieved by using a three-phase motor, a single-phase variable frequency drive and a splitting mechanism, in which the bamboo was split using the cylindrical rollers. Test results had shown that the machine could produce 144 pieces of thinned bamboo in 15 minutes. The machine also features a blade adjustment which can produce different thickness of the bamboo such as 1 mm, 1.5 mm and 2 mm. The machine could also thin 8 ft. long bamboo in 2.36 seconds. The performance of machine was evaluated by 30 evaluators and obtained the mean score of 4.24 which translates to Very Good in descriptive rating. This concludes that the bamboo splitting machine had managed to achieve its objectives. -- Author's abstract