Design and Development the Drinking Water Filling Machine with Low-Cost Automation for Community Enterprises

Abstract

This research aims to design and develop a prototype low-cost automatic water filling machine for community enterprises. According to a survey of the needs of 37 community enterprises, it was found that community enterprises need an affordable automatic water production and filling system. Automation can be easy to use and community enterprises can maintain it manually. Therefore, the design of low-cost automation has the idea of choosing materials that can be purchased in Thailand and the materials meet the requirements of food and pharmaceutical organizations such as stainless steel 304, drinking water filling heads are machined from stainless steel pipe, motor and valves etc. Water Filling Machine uses stainless steel lathe pipe as total filling head, 3 heads connecting to the water suction pump system. The system controls the filling head to move up and down according to the rhythm of the moving belt and automatically turns on and off the pneumatic system according to the number of fillings in each cycle. The downward movement of the filling head to the position of the bottle mouth will automatically turn on the suction pump for filling and will turn off the pump when the time set in the system is set according to the size of the bottle. Then the pneumatic system will open the door and the belt starts to work to convey the bottles out and bottles in at the same time, so that it can be produced continuously and does not use workers in the water filling process. The results showed that the drinking water filling system with control system has 3 filling heads. It takes about 6 seconds / 3 bottles to fill the water into a 500 ml bottle. The drinking water filling system can adjust the filling speed in the range of 3 seconds to 7 seconds per bottle, the filling time will vary according to the size of the bottle and is equipped with a photo sensor that can detect transparent objects to count the number of bottles that have been filled and send data to the production record system. The result of the use of materials made in Thailand and various equipment according to the appropriateness of the selected technology level, the cost of packing machines and equipment is about 30% lower than the market price, increased production capacity and easy maintenance. Therefore, this research meets the needs of community enterprises and can help increase of the production capacity of community enterprises.