With the expansion of the packaging market, the domestic packaging machinery industry is facing the bottleneck of the 'small and scattered' pattern. To address this issue, we should focus on related aspects such as packaging machinery equipment materials and technology. The development of packaging technology has evolved with the demand for commodity circulation. For goods, packaging mainly serves the functions of protection, isolation, quantification, decoration, and explanation, which are also the functions and characteristics of traditional packaging.

How to break through the "small and scattered" pattern in the packaging machinery industry

With the development of the commodity economy, the functional requirements for packaging are becoming increasingly strong, and the intelligence of packaging has become an inevitable trend in the development of commodity packaging.

From a broad perspective, after the founding of the People's Republic of China, China's basic packaging machinery industry began to take off. After more than half a century of development, there is still a considerable gap between it and the excellent level. Among them, only corrugated cardboard packaging machinery and some small packaging machines have a certain scale and advantage in China. In addition, some high-tech packaging equipment still needs to rely on imports.

According to data, the production of packaging machinery in China reached 670000 units in 2005 and increased to 930000 units in 2010. At present, packaging machinery in China has become one of the leading industries in the machinery industry. But the export value of packaging machinery in our country is still less than 5% of the total output value of this industry, while the import value is roughly equivalent to the total output value.
From the perspective of product structure, there are about 1300 types of packaging machinery in China, but the supporting quantity is small and lacks high-precision and large-scale products, which cannot meet market demand. The gap in product quality is manifested in poor stability and reliability of product performance, unattractive appearance, rough surface treatment, poor quality, short lifespan, and low reliability of many components, which affects the overall quality of the product; From the perspective of enterprise situation, there is a lack of domestic packaging machinery industry, and there are not many enterprises with large production scale and high product grade; From the perspective of product development, China is still basically in the stage of imitation, with weak self-development capabilities and research funding accounting for only 1% of sales, while foreign countries have as high as 8% -10%. Overall, compared to high-quality products, packaging machinery in China is at a disadvantage in terms of product development, performance, quality, reliability, and service.

Of course, overall, the research and development of most packaging machinery with excellent data technology in China is still in the stage of imitation, and the ability for independent development is still very limited. As a result, many large foreign companies have introduced their technology and components into China for local processing, thereby reducing costs and engaging in fierce competition with local products.
The high-precision direction has been clearly defined

The packaging chain is highly automated. Most of the packaging work in domestic food and pharmaceutical factories, especially the arrangement and assembly of complex packaging items, is basically done manually, which makes it difficult to ensure the uniformity and stability of packaging and may cause contamination of the packaged products.

Some food and pharmaceutical factories, even if they use packaging machinery, only apply it to a certain link in the entire packaging chain. For example, mechanical packaging is used for the first stage of packaging, while manual packaging is used for the second stage. Therefore, improving the automation and quality level of the entire packaging chain is a very important part of implementing GMP standards in modern enterprises. Each robotic arm of a truly modern packaging machinery should be controlled by a computer and have high resolution for material and thickness.
Diversified mechanical functions. Food and pharmaceutical products have become increasingly refined and diversified, with fewer single variety and large batch products, while multi variety and small batch products are becoming mainstream. Under the changing trend of the overall environment, packaging machines that are diversified, have multiple switching functions, and can adapt to the replacement of various packaging materials and molds can meet the needs of the market. For example, on a bubble wrap packaging machine, both aluminum-plastic packaging and aluminum aluminum packaging can be carried out, and it requires simple switching and fewer molds to be replaced. At present, the time for replacing molds is generally 1-2 hours, and such a long time cannot meet the production requirements of multiple varieties and small batches.

Modular structural design standards. For traditional industrial design, if you want to launch a new model, you need to do a lot of heavy work and rely on new equipment to recoup the high design costs, thereby raising the price of the new model. The future design should adopt a standardized and modular design concept, which can fully utilize the modular design of existing models, convert them into new models in a short period of time, and control the price of new models within a relatively reasonable range.

Intelligent control function. The control system is the brain of mechanical equipment and the core device for issuing action commands. At present, food and drug packaging machinery manufacturers commonly use programmable logic controllers (PLC controllers), which do not have the powerful functions possessed by industrial computers (PCs). For most traditional mechanical control equipment, using PLC is appropriate because the number of parameters that need to be controlled is limited, and many places still use mechanical control. For example, torque control uses mechanical clutches to provide overload protection for motors. However, with the improvement of equipment automation and the increasing number of computer-controlled devices, various sensors applied to the devices are no longer able to manage and control such a large number of parameters, and industrial PCs will be the choice.