In industry, the action of cutting, and in particular cutting foodstuffs, can be performed using various available techniques including traditional devices such as guillotine cutting devices, or indeed devices that have been developed quite recently, such as cutting food by means of a supersonic jet of water. That technique constitutes the subject matter of an article by Jean-Luc BOUTONNIER published in the journal Revue des ENIL (No. 163), pp. 5 to 12.
Another technique that is known and relatively recent is that of the ultrasound knife. In particular, a cutting unit as described in Japanese patent application No. 4-75898, filed by NIGATA and published on Mar. 10, 1992, makes use of ultrasound knives that are driven with reciprocating motion, each knife being set into vibration by an ultrasound generator which is merely coupled to one end of the knife blade so as to cause it to vibrate. A similar technique is described in Japanese patent application JP-122 2892, also filed in the name of NIGATA, and published on Sep. 6, 1989.
The technique of cutting by means of ultrasonically-vibrating blades makes it possible to ensure that the cut is clean, but to the detriment of speed, it being understood that the linear travel speed of the products, and thus the linear speed of cutting, is limited to a speed which, in practice, hardly exceeds 1 meter per minute (m/min).