In the biological laboratory at ten o'clock in the evening, technical director Chen Lu stared at the collagen stock solution under the microscope and frowned-this batch of raw materials for medical beauty injections had a viscosity of more than 15,000 cPs, and solidified into a gelatinous blockage in the traditional liquid packaging machine, just like the thrombus formed in the blood vessels, and the loss rate of each filling was as high as 12%. "This is not a packaging production line, it's simply a gold crusher." She smiled bitterly at the ply-pack engineer on the other end of the phone.
Viscous seal breaking technique
When the ply-pack team conducted an on-site survey, there was still some coagulated colloid left on the floor of the workshop that had not been cleaned up. The technical team found that the single screw structure of the conventional liquid packaging machine could not cope with this highly viscous material at all. The solution was finally locked in the double-screw supercharging system: the front screw breaks the colloidal fiber network at a speed of 20rpm, and the rear precision screw conveys the material in a constant pressure propulsion mode, and cooperates with the 55¡æ constant temperature flow channel to reduce the flow resistance.
"The scene on the day of the start-up was like a science fiction movie." Operator Lao Zhang recalled that the pressure curve on the monitoring screen gradually flattened from violent fluctuations to a straight line, and the viscous collagen stock solution finally flowed smoothly into the ampoule. After testing, the filling efficiency per hour increased from 300 to 850, and the filling accuracy was stable within the range of ±0.5%.
Invisible protection of intelligent pressure regulation
The greater challenge comes from changes in the production environment. Collagen is extremely sensitive to temperature, and the temperature difference between day and night can cause the material fluidity to fluctuate by 5%-8%. Ply-pack implanted a dynamic sensing module for this purpose: 32 embedded sensors monitor the material status in real time, and the intelligent pressure regulation system fine-tunes the screw pressure every 0.3 seconds to ensure that the viscosity difference between different batches does not affect the filling accuracy.
"The most amazing thing is the design for handling residual liquid." The quality inspection supervisor pointed to the filling head and explained. When the equipment detects that the filling is over, the anti-drip technology is immediately activated, and the 0.05MPa reverse airflow "blows" the wall-hanging materials back to the silo. This innovation reduces the loss of raw materials per batch from 3.2kg to less than 50g, saving more than 1.8 million yuan in annual costs.
Flexible evolution of liquid packaging solutions
As the product line expands, customers have added new requirements for packaging collagen essence containing microcapsules. Ply-pack responded quickly and added an ultrasonic vibration module to the original liquid packaging solution, reducing the breakage rate of active microcapsules with a diameter of 0.2mm from 15% to 1.8%. "It's like loading a smart plug-in for a precision instrument." Chen Lu wrote in the acceptance report.
Today, the company's three customized production lines have been running continuously for 6,000 hours without failure. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass of the workshop, you can see ampoules marching in a line on the conveyor belt, and the collagen solution in the bottle is clear and free of bubbles. The implementation of this liquid packaging solution not only solves the problem of biopharmaceutical packaging, but also speeds up the localization process of high-end medical beauty raw materials by 30%.
"I always thought that domestic equipment could not do precision filling well, but now this line has become our technical business card." Chen Lu stroked the operating data on the temperature control panel, and the warm yellow ceiling light in the laboratory reflected the starlight in her eyes - that was the confidence and pride in China's breakthrough in smart manufacturing.
