IPB University Students Find a Tool to Improve Palm Oil Quality and Quantity
There are major problems that usually occur in oil palm plantation businesses, one of which is in harvesting activities, namely the process of cucumber palm cereal extraction that is not in accordance with the procedure and most are not carried out. This causes a decrease in the quality and quantity of palm oil production. Moreover the palm leaf citation is still using manual method and sometimes the workers use scratching tools or shovels to take the loose fruit so that it hurts the palm (free fatty acids increase) and carries a lot of contaminants (sand, litter, soil), thus reducing the yield of Crude Palm Oil / CPO.
Based on this problem, five IPB University students made an innovation by creating a roller roller with a spiral steel coated with silicon rubber (carrier / making palm leaflets sticking to and entering the shelter). They are Tegar Nur Hidayat, Sanhaji, Dikki Hendra Pratama, Affan Afrizal Gani, Maulana Malik Yusuf, students of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Biosystems, Faculty of Agricultural Technology, IPB University.
"The innovation of this tool is to answer the challenge because until now no one has been able to make a loose-leaf pengutip machine that can work optimally and be used by oil palm plantations. The tools that we have designed are MICCO BRO (Ergonomic Collector for ‘Brondolan). This tool has the ability as a palm leaf custodian that is fast, effective and clean from the following contaminants along with a compact design, besides that this tool also has a handle that can be adjusted, "Tegar explained as the team leader.
The total costs used for the manufacture of MICCO BRO are calculated to be cheap, especially as they are needed. "MICCO BRO can also answer the challenges to the issues in the oil palm industry that employ underage children. With the MICCO BRO, workers are more easily citing loose fruit effectively and without causing significant fatigue so they do not need to employ children, "he added.
With his innovation, Tegar and his friends won funding from the Tanoto Foundation in the Tanoto Student Research Award (TSRA). This activity is carried out in order to gather and support the creative works of students. Tegar and his team won 1st place in the TSRA event on June 13, 2019 at the IPB level. "We are grateful, proud, and feel we have to thank a lot for the guidance and guidance of Dr. Radite Setiawan, "he said. Of course Tegar together with the team got a number of challenges, they acknowledged that the challenges they had to go through were limited time and very much trial and error in order to get the right results with quite complicated detail tools.
Tegar and his colleagues hope that their innovations can be publicly published so that they can be applied on many oil palm plantations. "We have submitted this innovation in the form of filing a patent for the invention of palm leaf extracting devices, and we have also formed a partnership with PTPN VIII Cikasungka so that this innovation can be applied as its function," he concluded. (NR)
