Last Friday afternoon, Xiao Li, a new commissioner in the workshop, stared at the control screen and scratched his head: "Mr. Wang, how can the rainbow candy packaging machine that the customer wants be loaded with five kinds of raw materials at the same time?" I smiled and pressed the star button of the formula library, watching the hopper on the conveyor belt automatically rotate like a waltz. This seemingly magical scene is the "trick" of the packaging machine multi-material switching system that our factory has been tossing for more than two years.
When visiting a puffed food factory in Fujian last year, their workshop director, Lao Zheng, pointed to four packaging machines of different colors and complained: "Every time we change the flavor, we have to stop production for two hours, and the workers' hands cramp from moving the raw materials." This was like a fishbone stuck in the throat of our technical team. After returning to the factory, Master Yang and his apprentices spread the disassembled metering modules all over the table, and found inspiration from the shift mechanism of the car gearbox to develop this planetary gear switching device.
How capable is our intelligent proportioning system now? Let's put it this way, when we modified the equipment for a pet food company in Northeast China last month, they required eight different formulas of cat food packaging to be processed every hour. During the debugging, the other party's technical supervisor held a stopwatch to time it. It only took three breaths to switch from beef flavor to fish flavor, and the accuracy was stuck within the industry standard error range. The workshop master joked that this speed was more efficient than the cafeteria aunt changing spoons when serving dishes.
For the operator's most headache-inducing cleaning residue problem, we used a trick of "transplanting flowers and trees". A rotatable scraper is installed at the bottom of the metering hopper, and the "scrubbing" process is automatically performed every time the material is switched. When Lao Zhou, the quality control manager of a nut factory in Zhejiang, inspected the conveyor belt, he deliberately touched the seam of the conveyor belt with white gloves: "Last time when I used other equipment, cashew crumbs always mixed into the almond packaging bags. Your anti-cross-contamination design is really something."
The unique skill of this system is its "goldfish memory". The intelligent proportioning system will record the flow characteristics of each batch of materials, and automatically adjust the vibration feeding frequency when encountering milk powder that is easy to agglomerate or flour that is easy to raise dust. When demonstrating to a southwest customer last week, their technician deliberately added 5% powdered sugar to the corn starch. As a result, the metering module seemed to have eyes and instantly raised the compensation parameters by eight gears.
We have done subtraction in terms of maintenance. The lubrication system of the planetary gear set has been changed to a visual "traffic light" prompt. The operator only needs to remember to change the special lubricant every quarter. Last month, when I visited a customer in Jiangsu, their maintenance team leader showed me a gear that had been used for half a year: "It's cleaner than the blade of my soymilk machine. Your self-cleaning function is really not a lie."
Before leaving get off work, Chen from the R&D department pulled me into the laboratory mysteriously. Wow, the new module they are testing can automatically match the packaging bag pattern when the packaging machine switches between multiple materials. It seems that before long, our equipment can really be like a magician, with the left hand producing spicy red packaging and the right hand producing barbecue green packaging.
