Designing and manufacturing an automatic knife for date palm tree frond cutting operations by frequency theory cutting

Date palm fronds cutting requires a lot of man power and workers, thus to do this operation easily and reduce effort, time and costs, an automatic knife was designed and manufactured to cut the palm tree fronds by frequency cutting technique. The equipment included the following parts: 1) engine; 2) clutch; 3) flexible and fixed shaft; 4) bevel gear case; and 5) cutting knife. The experiment was conducted for designing and manufacturing a vibration motorized cutter used for date palm fronds pruning. Three cutting angles (45, 60 and 90°), were included which were A1, A2 and A3, respectively. Three designs of knives were symbolized by B1 (L-shaped) and B2 (L-shape is obtuse-headed) and B3 in the form of a letter (C). The height of palm trees studied was 2 and 4 m and were symbolized by H1 and H2 in this experiment. Three rows of fronds cutting time, and a comparison between designed equipment were studied. The results showed that angle A3 gave the highest placement time of 2.72 min, significantly more than the angles A1 and A2. Two-m high palm required 2.53 min compared with 2.6 min for 4 m height. The B3 knife resulted in the highest laying time of 4.04 min compared to the knives B1 and B2, which required 1.74 and 1.76 min, respectively. The design and manufacturing of equipment used for cutting date palm fronds from the base was successful and can be used by the growers.