Disclosure of Invention
The present invention is designed to solve at least one of the problems of the prior art, and to achieve the above object, the present invention provides an ice making apparatus, which is specifically designed as follows.
An ice preparation device comprises an ice making box with an open top and an ice pushing mechanism, wherein the ice making box comprises a box body with a containing cavity; the ice pushing mechanism comprises a top disc arranged in the accommodating cavity and a push rod connected with the top disc and penetrating through the bottom of the ice making box, and the push rod drives the top disc to move along the height direction of the ice making box and simultaneously drives the top disc to rotate; the ice pushing mechanism is also provided with a handle arranged at one end of the push rod far away from the top disc;
a yielding area is formed on the bottom wall of the ice making box, and the handle in the yielding area can drive the push rod to rotate and move along the containing cavity; the abdication area is internally provided with a limiting part used for fixing the handle so as to lock the top disc.
Furthermore, the limiting part is a boss formed in the yielding area, and the part outside the limiting part in the yielding area relatively forms a movable part.
Furthermore, a positioning groove matched with the handle is formed in the boss.
Furthermore, the position on the limiting part and the position on the movable part are in an arc shape.
Further, the handle is arranged in the allowance area and does not extend out of the plane of the outer surface of the bottom wall of the ice making box.
Further, the handle is in running fit with the push rod.
Furthermore, the top disc is provided with a back surface close to one side of the bottom wall of the box body and a top surface far away from one side of the bottom wall of the box body, a back cavity is formed in the back surface, a gap is formed between the periphery of the top disc and the inner wall of the containing cavity, and the top space of the top disc is communicated to the back cavity through the gap.
Further, the width dimension of the gap is not more than 3 mm.
Furthermore, the top surface of the top plate is planar, and the cross section of the top plate is circular.
Further, a through hole for the push rod to pass through is formed at the bottom of the ice making box; the ice making device also has a seal disposed between the push rod and the through hole; the sealing element is sleeved on the push rod, one side of the sealing element is abutted to the sealing ring of the top disc, and the box body is formed with an annular boss at the edge of the through hole towards the direction in the accommodating cavity in a protruding mode.
The invention has the beneficial effects that: based on the specific structure of the ice preparation device, in the ice making process, the liquid water in the ice making box is gradually solidified from top to bottom, so that air released from the liquid water can be gradually collected towards the bottom of the accommodating cavity and cannot be wrapped by ice blocks, and the ice blocks can be discharged before the liquid water in the ice making box is completely solidified, so that the ice blocks with higher transparency can be obtained.
Detailed Description
The technical solutions in the embodiments of the present invention will be clearly and completely described below with reference to the drawings in the embodiments of the present invention, and it is obvious that the described embodiments are only a part of the embodiments of the present invention, and not all of the embodiments. All other embodiments, which can be derived by a person skilled in the art from the embodiments given herein without making any creative effort, shall fall within the protection scope of the present invention.
Referring to fig. 1, 3 and 7, the ice making apparatus according to the present invention includes an ice box 1 having an open top, and an ice pushing mechanism 2 for pushing out ice cubes in the ice box 1. The ice making box 1 comprises a box body 11 with a containing cavity 10 and a heat insulation layer 12 coated outside the box body 11; the ice pushing mechanism 2 includes a top tray 21 disposed in the accommodating cavity 10 and a push rod 22 connected to the top tray 21 and penetrating the bottom of the ice making housing 1 to push the top tray 21 along the height direction of the ice making housing 1, and a through hole 110 is formed at the bottom of the ice making housing 1 for the push rod 22 to pass through.
In the present invention, the top plate 21 has an initial state moved to the bottom of the receiving chamber 10 and a lifted state moved upward from the initial state to push the ice cubes in the receiving chamber 10. Referring to fig. 3, there is shown a schematic view of the top plate 21 in an initial state; referring to fig. 5, a schematic view of the top plate 21 in a raised state is shown. Wherein the ice making device further has a sealing member for sealing the through-hole 110 when the top plate 21 is in an initial state; thus, when the top plate 21 is in the initial state, the liquid water in the receiving cavity 10 is prevented from leaking from the through hole 110.
The process of ice making by adopting the transparent ice making mechanism comprises the following steps: locking the top plate 21 in an initial state, and injecting liquid water into the accommodating cavity 10; then the ice making box containing liquid water is placed in low-temperature places such as a freezing chamber and the like to realize the solidification of the liquid water; finally, the pushing rod 22 pushes up the top plate 21 to push the ice blocks on the top of the top plate 21 out of the containing cavity 10.
The invention has the beneficial effects that: based on the specific structure of the ice preparation device, due to the arrangement of the heat insulation layer 12, in the ice making process, the cold energy can only be transferred from the open side of the ice making box 1 to the liquid water, so that the liquid water in the ice making box 1 is gradually solidified and frozen from top to bottom, and correspondingly, the air released when the liquid water is solidified can gradually converge towards the bottom of the accommodating cavity 10 and cannot be wrapped by the ice blocks above; and then, the ice cubes with high transparency can be obtained by discharging the ice cubes before the liquid water in the ice making box 1 is completely solidified. In addition, even if the liquid water in the containing cavity 10 is completely solidified into ice, the prepared ice cubes only contain bubbles in a small area range at the bottom, and the overall transparency of the ice cubes is greatly improved compared with that of the ice cubes prepared by the traditional ice cube tray.
The top tray 210 of the present invention has a back surface on the side close to the bottom wall of the box body 11 and a top surface on the side far from the bottom wall of the box body 11. As a preferred embodiment of the present invention, referring to fig. 4 and 8, a back cavity 210 is formed on the back surface of the top plate 21, and when the top plate 21 is in the initial state, a gap (not shown) is formed between the periphery of the top plate 21 and the inner wall of the accommodating cavity 10, and the top space of the top plate 21 is communicated to the back cavity 210 through the gap. Based on the structure, in the ice making process, when the liquid water inside the receiving cavity 10 is completely solidified, the air released from the liquid water enters the back cavity 210 through the gap before the liquid water is completely solidified. In this way, even if all the liquid water in the storage chamber 10 is frozen into ice, all the ice cubes pushed out by the ice pushing mechanism at the top of the top plate 21 can be kept transparent.
In the present invention, the width dimension of the gap between the periphery of the top plate 21 and the inner wall of the housing chamber 10 is preferably not more than 3mm, and may be set to 1.5mm, for example. Because the width of the gap is small, when the liquid water in the containing cavity 10 is completely solidified into solid ice, the ice in the gap has a smaller thickness, so that when the ice pushing mechanism 2 is used for pushing out ice blocks, the ice in the gap is more easily broken, and the ice blocks on the top of the top plate 21 can be smoothly separated from the containing cavity 10.
As a preferred embodiment of the present invention, as shown in fig. 3 and 5, the top surface of the top plate 21 is planar. Since the top surface of the top plate 21 is planar, when the liquid water inside the receiving chamber 10 is completely solidified into solid ice, the ice cubes on the top of the top plate 21 have a small adhesive force with the top plate 21, thereby facilitating the separation between the ice cubes and the top plate 21.
Referring to fig. 2 and 7, the ice pushing mechanism 2 of the present invention further includes a rod-shaped handle 23 rotatably disposed about the push rod 22, wherein the handle 23 is disposed vertically with respect to the push rod 22 and has a middle portion connected to an end of the push rod 22 away from the top plate 21. As shown in fig. 2, an abdicating area 120 for the handle 23 to rotate and move along the height direction of the ice making box 1 is formed in the outer side of the bottom wall of the ice making box 1 in an upward concave manner, and a limiting portion for fixing the handle 23 to lock the top tray 21 in the initial state is further provided in the abdicating area 120.
Specifically, in the present embodiment, the position-limiting portion is a boss 121 formed in the receding area 120. Referring to fig. 2, in the abdicating area 120, the handle 23 is rotatably disposed by using the push rod 22 as a rotating shaft, and when the handle 23 rotates to an end surface of the abutting boss 121 far away from one side of the accommodating cavity 10, an interference fit relationship is formed between the handle 23 and the boss 121, so as to lock the top plate in the accommodating cavity 10 at an initial position; when the handle 23 is rotated to be separated from the boss 121, the user can push the push rod 22 through the handle 23 to move the top plate 21 in the receiving cavity 10, so that the top plate 21 is switched between the initial state and the jacking state.
In the present embodiment, referring to fig. 2, the handle 23 does not extend beyond the plane of the outer surface of the bottom wall of the ice making housing 1 when the top tray 21 is in the initial state. In the specific implementation process, the outer surface of the bottom wall of the ice making box 1 is generally planar, and because the handle 23 does not exceed the plane of the outer surface of the bottom wall of the ice making box 1, the ice making box 1 can be stably placed on a carrying platform in low-temperature places such as a refrigeration compartment and the like during ice making.
With reference to fig. 4, 6, 7, and 8, the sealing element in this embodiment is a sealing ring 24 sleeved on the push rod 22 and having one side abutting against the top disc 21, the box body 11 is formed with an annular boss 112 protruding from the edge of the through hole 110 toward the inner direction of the receiving cavity 10, and when the top disc 21 is in the initial state, the sealing ring 24 tightly abuts against the annular boss 112 to seal the through hole 110.
In this embodiment, as shown in fig. 3, the thermal insulation layer 12 is made of foam or other materials with better thermal insulation effect. In other embodiments of the present invention, the thermal insulation layer 12 may also be a coating layer with a vacuum region formed therein, and the thermal insulation layer 12 formed by the coating layer has a relatively poor thermal conductivity due to the vacuum region.
As further shown in fig. 7, the cartridge body 11 in this embodiment is cylindrical. In this embodiment, when the handle 23 is rotated, the top plate 23 can be synchronously rotated in the box body 11. It will of course be appreciated that in other embodiments of the invention, the handle 23 may also be arranged to rotate directly relative to the push rod 22, i.e. when the handle 23 is rotated, the push rod 22 and the top disk do not rotate.
Furthermore, the shape of the receiving cavity 10 in the present invention is an inverted frustum shape, that is, the cross-sectional area of the receiving cavity 10 gradually decreases from the top of the receiving cavity 10 to the bottom thereof, so that the ice cubes inside the receiving cavity 10 can be more easily pushed out by the ice pushing mechanism 2.
It should be understood that although the specification describes embodiments, not every embodiment includes only a single embodiment, and such description is for clarity purposes only, and it will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that the specification as a whole may be appropriately combined to form other embodiments as will be apparent to those skilled in the art.
The above-listed detailed description is only a specific description of a possible embodiment of the present invention, and they are not intended to limit the scope of the present invention, and equivalent embodiments or modifications made without departing from the technical spirit of the present invention should be included in the scope of the present invention.