Optimized design of a simplified interceptor for olive harvesting

It was been designed and realized a simplified interceptor system with olives harvest nets, to use during the olives harvesting phase for existing olives tree-plant on small surfaces. Such equipment complied to the design requirements of: inexpensiveness for investment and operative use, machine working in continuous, with possibility to use it for other similar crops, minimum employment of workman (an operator). The machine was constituted by a rectangular base climbed on wheels and hauled. It was surmounted by a grate that allowed the sieve of the olives and by a cage of nets, with form of trunk of inverted pyramid that, sustained by mechanically driven bars, succeeded in surrounding the tree locks. The machine tangentially worked to the trees trunks along the convenience order of the olive-tree-plant. By mean a pneumatic command, two telescopic bars that sustained the nets, escaped, so that they surrounded the whole tree trunk, in few second. At this point the shaking phase began. The olives harvested, by mean the inclination of the planes formed by the base nets, they went in the grate impending the tank of the considered machine, and therefore they were collected in the vain underlying. During the performed experimental tests, the detected losses on soil have practically almost been void. Finished such phase, reversing the pneumatic command, the return in initial condition of the nets was had, that is, they were displaced on the right broadside of the considered machine, and it was ready to be reallocated, under the following tree.