The workshop old Zhang often said: "The skills of the canning packaging machine are all in the invisible place." I understand this completely - when a customer from Guangdong visited last week, he pointed to the equipment we were debugging and asked: "How can the same canning packaging machine fill Coke in the morning and motor oil in the afternoon?" This problem is the technical fortress that our factory has been struggling for three years to break through.
Let me first talk about a counterintuitive discovery: the difficulties of filling carbonated beverages and industrial lubricants are highly similar! The former needs to lock the bubbles from escaping, and the latter needs to prevent viscosity changes from affecting metering. Our canning packaging machine is specially designed with a "dual-mode pressure chamber" to solve this contradiction through an adaptive flow valve. When filling cola, the cabin will maintain a slightly positive pressure environment to prevent carbon dioxide from escaping and causing inaccurate liquid levels; when switching to oil filling, the system automatically switches to negative pressure mode, allowing high-viscosity liquids to flow out evenly like squeezing toothpaste. Last year, when renovating the can production line for a certain auto parts factory in Zhejiang, they used the same equipment to achieve the alternating production of antifreeze and cleaning agent. The workshop director joked that this canning and packaging machine can "change faces" more than the workers.
Sealing integrity is the lifeblood of the canning and packaging machine. Do you know the hair-thin sealant at the opening of the can? Our factory and the chemical laboratory worked on the formula for eight months and finally came up with a "temperature memory coating". When the can body passes through the sealing module, the coating will produce elastic deformation at a specific temperature, which not only ensures a crisp feel when opening the can, but also withstands the bumps of sea transportation. This spring, a Qingdao brewery came to us with a sample of cans that were complained about by customers. After opening it, it was found that it was metal fatigue at the seal. Now, each canning and packaging machine on their new production line has been equipped with our laser micro-welding reinforcement device. I heard that the goods shipped to tropical areas recently have no more can swelling problems.
What makes us even more proud is the clean design. Traditional canning and packaging machines need to disassemble and clean more than a dozen parts when switching materials. Our engineers got inspiration from high-pressure spray trucks and developed a "self-flushing flow channel". Last month, when a canning factory in Fujian was testing the machine, I saw with my own eyes that the equipment switched from eight-treasure porridge to syrup lychee, and it only took three minutes of backwashing to reach food-grade hygiene standards. This system is particularly suitable for companies that do overseas orders - the coconut milk curry cans required by Southeast Asian customers and the baby food cans required by European customers can be seamlessly switched on the same can production line, and the working hours saved are enough to run two more shipping schedules.
Recently, the technical department has come up with a new idea: to install a "material character recognition system" on the canning and packaging machine. Just like the old workers know how to adjust the equipment by weighing the raw materials, now the surface tension, gas content and other parameters of the material are analyzed through fluid sensors to automatically match the filling strategy. A new functional beverage factory in Hebei became the first to try it out. Their new product added nano-level bubbles, and the bubbles would be stratified after filling with ordinary equipment. With our canning and packaging machine, every can of beverage coming out of the assembly line can maintain the visual effect of "galaxy vortex", and young people are rushing to shoot short videos and post them on social media.
Standing on the observation platform on the second floor of the workshop and looking down, more than a dozen canning and packaging machines are gurgling and swallowing tinplate cans. These iron guys look bulky, but they contain more than 20 years of technical accumulation of our factory. Next time you pass by, be sure to try the sample filled by our equipment - the sound of opening the can of herbal tea is guaranteed to be more comfortable than the notification sound of a mobile phone.
