During the typhoon season last year, the workshop of a fish ball factory in Fujian was simply a water curtain cave - the packaging machine in the corner went on strike every half an hour, and the maintenance master Lao Zhao stamped his feet in anxiety: "This machine is like a temper when it touches water vapor, and the sealing strip can be twisted out of water!" This matter was reported back to the factory, and our technical team immediately held a closed-door meeting for three days, and worked hard to come up with the current high humidity environment packaging machine that is specially designed for humid conditions.
What is special about this machine? You will know it by touching its "iron bones" first. When installing the machine for Qingdao Kelp Factory last month, Mr. Wang, the customer, knocked on the machine shell and asked: "Isn't this shiny material chrome-plated?" I smiled and explained: "This is our specially adjusted stainless steel body, which is more than three times more corrosion-resistant than ordinary materials." In fact, in order to select materials, we went to more than a dozen seafood processing factories and found that the cast iron frame of traditional packaging machines would rust within half a year in a humid environment. Now this stainless steel "armor" is still as shiny as new even if it is soaked in a workshop filled with salt fog.
But having a hard bone is not enough, the key is to be able to "breathe". Last week, I went to Zhuhai to debug the equipment. It happened to be the return of the south wind, and the glass wall of the workshop was full of water droplets. Our newly installed high-humidity environment packaging machine is like nothing happened. The secret lies in the automatic dehumidification module on the top. This thing is like a small air conditioner. It can sense the ambient humidity in real time and start condensation dehumidification once it exceeds the set value. Operator Sister Li stared at the air outlet and laughed: "The machine would have been stuck at this time before, but now it can blow some dry air for us!"
What I am most proud of is the moisture-proof sealing technology. I remember when we renovated the production line for the Sichuan hot sauce factory, their old equipment always leaked during filling, and the red oil dyed the conveyor belt like a couplet. Our engineers installed double silicone sealing rings at key locations, with the outer layer responsible for rigid protection and the inner layer made into a maze-like structure. Now even if the sauce splashes onto the joints of the robot arm, it will be locked by layers of "mazes". Workshop director Lao Zhang touched the sealing groove and sighed: "This design is comparable to the leak-proof valve of a pressure cooker!"
You may ask: Will these improvements affect the packaging speed? The comparison test conducted at the Ningbo Shrimp Factory last month is the best example. Ordinary packaging machines have to stop for dehumidification after running for two hours in a humid environment, but our high-humidity packaging machines can withstand eight hours of continuous operation. It's not that the machine doesn't know how to get tired, but that we added a humidity compensation algorithm to the drive system. When the sensor finds that the motor load increases due to humidity, it will automatically increase the torque output to ensure that the sealing pressure is always stable.
Now when you walk into our assembly workshop, you can always see the masters holding a spray bottle to spray water on the semi-finished products for testing. Once a new intern couldn't stand it: "Is it okay to ruin the machine like this?" The old master pressed the start button of the wet packaging machine with his backhand: "See? This is called a real-life exercise! Last year, the equipment installed for the Hainan Coconut Powder Factory leaked from the roof of the workshop during a typhoon, and their packaging machine continued to run for three days and three nights as usual."
Recently, the trend of "seeking benefits from the sea" has emerged in the industry, and our factory's high-humidity environment packaging machine has suddenly become a hot commodity. The day before yesterday, a Korean customer who made kimchi came to inspect and pointed at the equipment and asked: "Can this be used in a sub-zero cold storage?" Xiao Liu from the technical department took the person to the test workshop on the spot, dropped the temperature to minus 5 degrees, and adjusted the humidity to 85%. When the packaging machine smoothly completed the packaging of the tenth basket of kimchi, the customer gave a thumbs up and said, "This is the all-weather warrior we want!"
The secret of this business is actually hidden in the slogan on the wall of the workshop: "Take failure as a teacher and take difficult problems as exam questions." Now every high-humidity environment packaging machine shipped out of the factory must undergo a 72-hour humid environment endurance test. Watching the equipment running stably in the atomization cabin simulating the seafood workshop, I often joke with my new colleagues: "If our machine could talk, it would definitely complain - it takes a bath every day but doesn't give me a back scrub!"
