development and testing of a portable palm tree pruning machine

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DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF A PORTABLE
PALM TREE PRUNING MACHINE
K. M. Ismail 1 and K. A. Al -Gaadi 2
1 Prof., and 2 Assis. Prof. at Dept. of Agric. Eng., King Saud University-Gassim, Saudi Arabia.
ABSTRACT
Palm trees are considered to be very popular in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where over
12 million productive trees are planted throughout the kingdom (Bakry, 2000). The production of
dates requires a set of field operations. Unfortunately, most of these operations are not yet
mechanized, thus, they are inefficiently conducted, costly, tedious and time consuming (Bakry,
2000). One of the important field operations is the tree pruning which is widely conducted
manually using a conventional hand-held saw. Therefore, an AC-operated portable machine was
developed to mechanize the pruning operation. The performance of the machine was tested.
Power, energy, and time of cutting were considered for evaluating the machine’s performance. It
was found that the relationships between moisture content of petioles (MC) and power, energy
and time required for cutting were all significant, where the determination factors were 0.86,
0.71, and 0.81, respectively. The results revealed that both energy and time required for cutting
were proportional to the MC. The mean value of energy required to cut 1 cm 2 of petiole cross
section area was 35 W.sec at 70% MC, while it was 12 W.sec at 10% MC. The average time of
cutting was 3.5 sec/cm 2 at 70% MC, while it was about 1 sec/cm 2 at 10% MC. However, the
power required for cutting was found to be inversely proportional to the MC. A power of 28
W/cm 2 was required at 10% MC, while only 10 W/cm 2 was required at 70% MC.
Keywords: Palm tree, pruning, energy, power, time, performance, cutting.
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