As soon as the rice bag on the conveyor belt enters the sealing station, the fine rice grains fall from the sealing gap. The operator hurriedly presses the emergency stop button and bends down to clean up the scattered fragrant rice - this is a scene repeated more than ten times a day in the packaging workshop of a Thai fragrant rice processing plant. It was not until an automatic weighing and sealing machine equipped with a flexible sealing system entered the production line that the "rice leakage battle" that lasted for several years ushered in a turning point.
The slender grains unique to Thai fragrant rice are very easy to slip off the edge of the seal during the traditional heat sealing process. Technicians have tried to adjust parameters such as temperature and pressure, but they have never been able to balance the sealing strength and the integrity of the rice grains. The dual-roller adaptive system of the new automatic weighing and sealing machine is like a "smart palm" tailored for rice bags. When the rice bag passes through the infrared thickness gauge, the system can identify the difference in bag opening thickness within 0.03 seconds, automatically adjust the clamping force of the two sets of rollers, and ensure that the 5-15 mm bag opening can be evenly sealed.
During the trial operation stage, the workshop deliberately selected batches with a broken rice rate of up to 12% for testing. The monitoring screen shows that when the fragrant rice mixed with broken rice flows through the sealing area, the equipment automatically switches to the "broken compensation mode", raising the sealing temperature by 8°C and extending the pressure holding time by 0.5 seconds. In the end, the actual loss rate of this batch of raw materials that might have caused 3.2% loss was reduced to 0.3%. The workshop director pointed to the real-time data screen and sighed: "This flexible sealing system is like a smart insurance for the rice bag. Now the number of night shift inspections has been reduced by three quarters."
The intelligent packaging characteristics of the solution are triggering a chain reaction. The depth of the wavy embossing at the seal of the rice bag has increased by 0.2 mm, which not only retains the visual effect of traditional manual bundling, but also increases the compressive strength to 23kgf. The logistics department reported that the bag breakage rate during transportation has dropped sharply from 15 pieces per month to less than 2 pieces. What is even more surprising is that the stable packaging quality has enabled the factory to obtain access to high-end supermarkets in the European Union for the first time, and the shelf life certification has been extended by 40 days.
In the packaging workshop at dusk, the warning light of the automatic weighing and sealing machine turns from yellow to green. Operators no longer need to wait at the sealing station with a broom in hand, instead, there is a stable loss curve on the computer in the monitoring room. A grain of Thai fragrant rice falls from the gap of the conveyor belt and is accurately captured by the negative pressure recovery device at the moment it is about to touch the ground. This technical detail that has troubled the industry for many years has now become a tiny footnote in the evolution of smart packaging.
