Experimental study about the effects of disc chipper settings on the distribution of wood chip size

Nowadays wood should be of principal sources of biomass. This wood is transformed into chips in order to increase automatic operations and to decrease the technical effort needed at the energy conversion plant. Typical high quality chips, which are used to feed small woodchip boilers, vary in size from 10 x 10 x 5 mm to 15 x 15 x 8 mm. Chips that are relatively square and flat are easily conveyed, augured, and fed into the system smoothly. We are mainly interested in the raw material of inferior quality. A disc chipper test bench was constructed in our laboratory to study the chipping process in cutting conditions which are similar to those used in the industry. The test bench design allows many factors to be varied include cutting speed, feed per tooth, cutting angles, anvil height and cutting direction. In this paper, we attempt to understand the effect of several factors on chip size distribution. Four feeds per tooth, four cutting angles, two sharpness angles and three cutting speeds were chosen to cut wet logs of oak and fir wood, while the other factors remained constant. The results are similar for both oak and fir. The proportion of small chips decreases when we increase the feed per tooth, the cutting angle and the sharpness angle, whereas it increases when the cutting speed is increased. The feed per tooth and the cutting speed have a linear effect on the variations in the size distribution, while the cutting angle has a non-linear effect on these variations. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.