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Efficient Way to Cut Palm EFB into Short Fibers

By:Mr Darren Chen
Position:Project Sales Director
May 18, 2026
Palm EFB is an abundant biomass feedstock, widely adopted as biomass fuel for industrial boilers in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and other regions with developed palm oil industries, and is particularly well-suited for fuel supply in power plants. Apart from being directly shredded and fed into boilers, palm EFB is commonly processed into briquettes or pellets for easier storage and transportation.
 
One SIMEC client from Thailand ordered a complete palm EFB briquetting line including a set of SIMEC SCM1400/600 palm EFB cutting mill and a set of SBP6KA palm EFB briquetting machine. The palm EFB cutting mill is designed to stably produce short fibers less than 30mm with a maximum 6 tph output capacity.
 
During the processing of palm EFB, size reduction poses a key challenge. As a fibrous biomass material, palm EFB has high toughness and is prone to entanglement. According to the client’s practical operation experience, neither disc crushers nor drum shredders can achieve ideal crushing performance or ensure long-term durability.
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SIMEC SCM1400/600 cutting mill is specially engineered to efficiently crush the palm EFB chunks into evenly sized short fibers. Its unique V-shaped cutter arrangement, combined with heavy-duty fixed blades, significantly boosts shearing force. It lowers the main shaft’s instantaneous load, delivers excellent anti-tangling and anti-jamming capability, ensures low vibration and stable running, achieves more uniform crushing results, and cuts down overall maintenance costs. The cutting mill maintains a steady production capacity of 5 to 6 tons per hour, with the finished fiber size controlled within 30mm.
 
Before shipping the SCM1400/600 palm EFB cutting mill to Thailand, SIMEC conducted a successful factory test run to verify equipment performance and ensure it fully meets the customer's production requirements.

The cutting process reduces the EFB chunk size from 200×100 mm to short fibers of 30 mm or less. The material’s moisture content decreases slightly, dropping by approximately 1–2 percentage points to a range of 38%–43%. This slight drop in moisture content is attributed to surface moisture evaporation during the cutting process, rather than intentional drying.
  Material Size Moisture Content
Input Palm EFB Chunks 200 x 100 mm 40%-45%
Output Palm EFB Short Fiber ≤30 mm 38%-43%

With its excellent performance verified by factory test run, the SIMEC palm EFB cutting mill has proven to be the preferred equipment in EFB briquette production. For more information, please refer to the video demonstration: https://www.simecpellet.com/videos/size-reduction/palm-efb-shredding-demonstration.html
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In addition to highly-efficient EFB fiber processing, the cutting mill also features the following advantages:
    1. The widened feed inlet prevents material blockage and bridging, lowering labor intensity;
    2. The hydraulic lid opening design makes it easy to inspect the cutting chamber and maintain cutting knives;
    3. The hydraulic screen opening allows easy inspection and maintenance of cutting screen;
    4. Reinforced frame plus wear-resistant liners on both sides of the main shaft enhance equipment durability and reduce failure frequency;
    5. Fitted with limit switches and automatic overload protection device, ensuring operational safety and extending equipment service life.

By replacing key components, the SIMEC SCM1400/600 palm EFB cutting mill can also turn bulky palm EFB into 10 mm short fibers. This enables the machine to be applied in other fields such as palm EFB pellet making and palm EFB fine powder production. Besides processing palm EFB, the cutting mill is also capable of handling other highly fibrous and easily tangled raw materials such as coconut husk, sugarcane bagasse and agave bagasse.