Faculty of Engineering - Department of Industrial

The objective of this project is design and manufacturing of olive pitting machine, as investors explained their need for a pitting machine for a 60 Acre olive farm. The company's target is to extract pits from collected olive in high production rate. This project presents a proposed design of a hybrid of both rotary type and reciprocating type pitting machines. An electric powered pneumatic machine for pitting olives in which a CNC rotary indexing table carries olives in and out from the pitting process where a vertical pitting and extraction mechanisms are placed on the vertical plane assembled with a pitting head that has multiple knives to induce the cut and extraction of the pits by punch, where linear reciprocating motion is produced by a pneumatic cylinder controlled by directional valves which in its turn controlled by microcontroller..
This micro controller in its turn is responsible for the position and the number of steps exerted by the stepper motor that controls the rotary indexing table and therefore controls the alignment and timing of pitting knives and rotary indexing table which can be considered as the feed motion. This machine produces a small diameter vertical cylindrical cut resulting in accurate extraction while maintaining the remained undamaged. Keywords: Pneumatic, reciprocating, rotary indexing table, pitting mechanism.