Failure Analysis of the Short Drive Shaft in a Screw Press Machine

Abstract

The screw press is a type of machine press used for extracting crude palm oil from the oil palm’s mesocarp, where its short driveshaft, a mechanical component for transmitting torque and rotation, is often found to be susceptible to failure. Since the initial damage to the short driveshafts in the shaft keyway area is associated with the frequent incidence of shaft failure, this research aimed to discover the root cause of this failure and how to prevent it using visual inspection and stress analysis methods as well as those of the fractography, metallography, chemical composition, and hardness tests. Using the descriptive method to analyse the collected data, the visual inspection and the fractography results of the research indicated that the fatigue crack failure of the short drive shaft in the palm oil screw press machine was caused by the fatigue crack initiation that was safe from stress concentration in its keyway areas. This crack initiation was followed by crack propagation as indicated in beach mark forms. Finally, the ductile fracture observed on the shaft surface was found to have resulted from the continuous rotational motion and the loading and unloading effect of the central shaft driving system.

Development and Performance Evaluation of a Variable-Pitch Tapered-Shaft Screw Press for Palm Oil Extraction

“…Open belt, as shown in Figure 6, was considered because of its flexibility. Typically, the length of belt, power transmitted, angle of contact or lap, and load carried by the screw were designed according to Firdaus et al (2017) and Muhammad et al (2021) reported ineffective press (in terms of high oil loss and nut breakage), and shaft failure during testing of constant pitch screw press machine.…”

“…On the other hand, a screw press with uniform pitch shaft uses high speed/high power motor to effectively extract oil from oil-based seed materials, thus affecting cost (Olayanju et al, 2016). In the performance evaluation of some screw press, Firdaus et al (2017) and Muhammad et al (2021) reported ineffective press (in terms of high oil loss and nut breakage), and shaft failure, respectively.…”

Investigation of constructive and technological parameters of an energy-efficient screw oil press

“…The effectiveness of screw presses is evaluated for throughput capacity, feed rate, press cake oil content, oil expelling efficiency, percentage un-pressed grits output, percentage sludge output, and specific energy consumption [23]. The driveshaft of screw press is often found to be susceptible to failure, it is important to discover the root cause of this failure and the ways of its prevention [24]. The mechanical oil extraction using a commercial screw press was evaluated in the study [25].…”