In the extremely cold industrial zone of St. Petersburg, Russia, Almaz Nut, a well-known local nut processing company, has lost more than 12% of its annual production capacity for three consecutive years due to winter packaging equipment failures. At the beginning of 2023, the ply-pack technical team went deep into the company's -30¡æ operation workshop, and tailored a high-cold environment packaging system for stubborn problems such as low-temperature jamming of the transmission system and brittle cracking of the packaging film, successfully achieving uninterrupted production throughout the year.
Technical breakthrough in the extremely cold workshop
Almaz Nut's original equipment often stopped the conveyor belt due to solidification of lubricating oil in winter, with a daily failure frequency of up to 5-8 times. ply-pack engineers innovatively adopted a temperature zone control system and implanted self-heating modules in key parts of the equipment: the transmission gear set is equipped with a constant temperature oil circuit circulation device to ensure that the gear meshing clearance is stable at ±0.05mm under -35¡æ environment; the film material conveying channel integrates a dynamic temperature control sensor to adjust the surface temperature of the packaging material to the elastic range of 8-12¡æ in real time. After the transformation, the equipment operated continuously for 2,000 hours during the snowstorm season, and the packaging film breakage rate dropped sharply from 23% to 1.7%.
Intelligent maintenance breaks regional barriers
"The video guidance at 3 a.m. allowed us to avoid three days of production suspension." Mikhail, equipment supervisor of Almaz Nut, recalled. The Russian version of the intelligent diagnostic system customized by ply-pack can warn of bearing abnormalities 48 hours in advance through vibration frequency analysis. The 200 sets of cold-resistant special accessories stored in the Moscow Spare Parts Center, in cooperation with the engineering team of the Yekaterinburg Technical Service Station, shortened the fault response time to 4 hours. In January this year, the equipment suddenly had ice crystals blocking the feed inlet. The Chinese and Russian technical teams used AR remote collaboration to restore the production line in just 90 minutes.
Flexible production line activates diversified production
In addition to solving the low temperature problem, ply-pack implanted an intelligent visual recognition module into the production line. The new system can automatically identify the particle size differences of six kinds of nuts such as cashews and hazelnuts, and the packaging speed is increased from 80 bags/minute to 120 bags/minute, and foreign matter detection and nitrogen filling calibration are completed simultaneously. The improved compatibility of the production line has enabled Almaz Nut to expand its high-value-added mixed nut products, and three new European supermarket customers will be added in the first quarter of 2024.
Continuous empowerment of cross-border collaboration
The ply-pack technical team goes to Russia every quarter to conduct equipment health inspections and has optimized 27 operating parameters in total. The recently upgraded energy consumption monitoring system customizes a "low-temperature production energy-saving curve" for Almaz Nut by analyzing the power fluctuations of the equipment in the range of -20¡æ to -35¡æ, and it is expected that the annual electricity bill expenditure can be reduced by 18%. The antifreeze nitrogen filling device jointly developed by the two parties has now been incorporated into the ply-pack standard model configuration and exported to 12 food companies in the three Nordic countries. The successful implementation of this project has promoted ply-pack's market share in Russia's high-altitude cold regions to 24%. With the completion of the Kazan Technical Laboratory, the company is modularizing core technologies such as intelligent temperature control and material cold resistance testing to provide more multinational companies with replicable polar production solutions.
