The Lantern Festival is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first month of the lunar calendar, right after Chinese New Year. It is the first full moon of the year that symbolizes a grateful wish for a whole new start of the year. Chinese families light lanterns and cook rice balls to celebrate the end of the bitter winter and welcome the upcoming spring. During the holiday, families prepare a bowl of hand-made home-style rice balls for each family member for good luck and best wishes. Rice balls are holiday products that symbolize a smooth and peaceful year during family gatherings. In today's modern society, the traditional process for making hand-made rice balls is time and labor consuming and can hardly meet the immense demand for this holiday food. To preserve this beautiful tradition, food manufacturers have adopted automated equipment to produce a variety of rice ball products for today's consumers.
Traditional rice balls are made with a hand-kneading or hand-shaking process that depends on manpower for kneading the rice dough, seasoning, mixing, stuffing, shaping, shaking, placing and packaging. Even with semi-automatic production, the processes require workers to lift and place materials from one production line to another, reducing production efficiency and potentially causing sanitary concerns.
Automatic rice ball making machines are ideal equipment for manufacturing rice ball products that can ensure the production processes for these traditional delicacies conform to national food manufacturing and sanitary standards. In general, the automatic processes for making rice balls include two major techniques: “shaping” and “placing”. For the shaping technique, there are several sub-steps to follow: feeding, kneading, mixing, stuffing, and rolling. Delta's rice ball making machine solution adopts automation equipment to carry out several rice ball manufacturing processes, and also integrate the placing process into a single production line with multiple procedures. The automatic rice ball making machine fulfills the demands for mass production, helps save material costs, and increases yield rates. In addition, with automation equipment, operators can benefit from various user-friendly program commands to achieve a high-efficiency and stable rice ball production line.
To construct a comprehensive rice ball production line, Delta's automatic rice ball making machine solution adopts programmable logic controllers, AC motor drives, AC servo systems and human machine interfaces. To control multiple devices in the production line, this solution is equipped with the High Performance PLC DVP-EH3 Series as the master controller that allows operators to set up and give commands through the Widescreen HMI DOP-B Series. This achieves a one-step setup for all procedures used for rice ball shaping and placing techniques.
When raw materials such as rice dough and meat stuffing is fed into the production line, the High Performance PLC DVP-EH3 Series gives commands to the Sensorless Vector Control Compact Drive VFD-EL Series via RS-485 communication protocols to drive two sets of mixing machines that squeeze out the dough or meat stuffing. Another set of AC motor drives covers the meat stuffing with a dispensed piece of rice dough and forms them into shape. The AC motor drive then drives components to roll the semi-finished products, simulating the hand rolling of the rice balls and shaking them on a bamboo basket. When the semi-finished products are rolled into round shapes by the machine, the finished rice ball products are precisely placed onto a tray by two sets of the moving axes controlled by the AC Servo Systems ASDA-B2 Series, which completes the placing process. The placing patterns can be set up based on users' requirements via the Human Machine Interface DOP-B Series, and the shaped rice balls are placed on the corresponding trays for the following packaging process.
After actual application, Delta's automatic rice ball making machine solution provides the following benefits to customers:
· Human machine interface monitoring for flexible parameter setup: Users can easily monitor rice ball manufacturing and with the human machine interfaces adjust parameters such as rice ball gram weight, intervals between rice balls, and product placing patterns, to achieve flexible production monitoring.
· Single production line integrates multiple processes for enhanced efficiency: This solution integrates all sub-steps of the shaping process as well as the placing process, to build a one-stop production line that benefits by saving materials cost and increasing production efficiency. In addition, the High Performance PLC DVP-EH3 Series provides multitasking and stable logic control to ensure quality consistency during mass production, achieving stable, high-speed, and high-efficiency control of multiple devices.
· One-stop solution for saving costs: Delta's rice ball making machine solution integrates customers' production lines without replacing existing equipment. In addition, a production line equipped with Delta's automation products provides high compatibility and easy-to-maintain features, achieving a perfect one-stop automation solution.
Delta offers the automatic rice ball machine making solution by integrating automation equipment with food manufacturing machines, and building high-efficiency and standardized mass production. Industrial automation effectively reduces costs for both labor and time, and plays a role in preserving the ancient rice ball tradition for today's modern society.