The Lantern Festival 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 on Lantern Festival, and traditional rice balls are made with a hand-kneading or hand-shaking process. Even with semi-automatic production, the processes require workers to lift and place materials from one production line to another.

Automatic rice ball making machines are ideal equipment for manufacturing rice ball products. 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. The placing process into a single production line with multiple procedures to achieve a high-efficiency and stable rice ball production line.

The AC servo drives precisely position two set of axes for the following placing and packaging by conveyors

To construct a comprehensive rice ball 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 for all procedures used for rice ball shaping and placing techniques.

When raw materials 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. When the semi-finished products are rolled into round shapes by the machine, the finished rice ball products are precisely placed onto a tray.

After actual application, Delta’s automatic rice ball making machine solution provides the human machine interface monitoring, single production line integrates multiple processes, one-stop solution benefits to customers, and plays a role in preserving the ancient rice ball tradition for today’s modern society.

Delta automation products adopt powerful hardware and software to fulfill flexible industry applications