Last month, Li Gong in the workshop almost had a fight with the vibration plate - the deep roasted coffee granules sent by customers in Yunnan always "fight" at the feed port. They are obviously beans from the same batch, some are stuck horizontally, and some are stacked vertically. This scene is not uncommon at the debugging site of our coffee granule packaging machine, but this time it has spawned a new technological breakthrough.
The traditional vibration plate is like a stubborn conductor who can only "beat" at a fixed frequency. But coffee granules are a group of disobedient "musicians". Deep roasted ones are crisp, light roasted ones are hard, and there are also honey-treated ones with sugar coating. The friction coefficient of each granule can differ by an order of magnitude. Our factory started thinking about this last year. It was not until we debugged the equipment for a Chilean customer and saw the clumsy way of the local workers manually adjusting the amplitude that we really found a breakthrough.
The current intelligent adjustment algorithm gives the vibration plate a "tactile sense". When upgrading the equipment for a boutique coffee shop in Hangzhou last week, their blended beans contained three sizes of particles. During the debugging, I deliberately grabbed a handful of beans and sprinkled them into the hopper. I saw that the vibration plate first separated the large particles with high-frequency vibration, then switched to wave-like push, and finally used the cushioning mode to deal with those sun-dried beans that are easy to break. The customer's technician held a magnifying glass to watch the whole process and said: "This method is more sophisticated than my hand-brewed coffee."
The core of frequency adaptive technology lies in the "perception-decision-making" closed loop. At the Qingdao exhibition last quarter, our coffee granule packaging machine demonstrated its ability to cope with humid environments on site. When a southern customer deliberately sprayed water mist to simulate plum rain weather, the humidity sensor on the inside of the vibration plate instantly triggered the anti-sticking mode, and shook off the water droplets through slight vibration. An old engineer in the crowd sighed: "I have been adjusting the vibration plate for 20 years, and this is the first time I have seen the equipment "dump water" by itself."
The most practical benefit of this technology is that it saves labor. Customers at the Yunnan base have calculated that they had to stop the machine for half an hour to adjust each batch of coffee beans. Now the equipment can autonomously learn the characteristics of particles from different origins, basically achieving "changing beans without adjusting the machine". Last month, when they processed Ethiopian shepherd beans, the vibration plate even automatically reduced energy consumption by 20% - later we found that the algorithm recognized the natural high fluidity of such particles and intelligently reduced the driving force.
A new term called "vibration plate psychology" has been popular in the workshop recently. It means that the equipment can adjust its strategy according to the "temper" of coffee particles: when encountering stubborn Robusta beans, it uses fast frequency and fast output, and when encountering delicate Gesha beans, it changes to slow shaking and gentle delivery. When debugging an order from a Guatemalan customer last week, their production supervisor found that the same vibration plate could seamlessly switch between Arabica and Liberica beans, and decided on the spot to bring forward the equipment upgrade plan for next year.
From mechanical vibration to intelligent self-adaptation, the evolution of our coffee granule packaging machine is like a microcosm of the development of the coffee industry - it must retain the traditional mellowness and integrate innovative agility. Now when you walk into the test workshop, you can see coffee granules of different colors flowing in an orderly manner on the vibration plate, like miniature coffee rivers. If you are having a headache about packaging special-shaped granules, welcome to listen to how our vibration plate interprets packaging aesthetics with "intelligent beats".
