Toyota RTO Heat Recovery and Steam Elimination for Paint Booths

The Paint shop at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas, Inc. (TMMTX), located in San Antonio, Texas has been working to create positive change with our 2050 environmental challenge. To improve our energy and CO2 emissions, we have been working to eliminate the older steam technology in the painting process. Steam is inefficient and was used to heat and humidify the paint spray booths for painting our vehicles. TMMTX has built a new process to collect waste heat from their two regenerative thermal oxidizers or (RTOs). The RTOs are a type of air pollution control equipment that destroys hazardous air pollutants (HAP), volatile organic compounds (VOC), and odorous emissions created during the painting process to protect the environment that are required for environmental protection. The RTO’s produce waste heat that are captured to produce hot water without burning additional natural gas. The hot water is then used in controlling the paint spray booth temperature and humidity in a greener way.

The new RTO heat recovery system has two large heat exchangers and has been quite an investment of over 2 years worth of planning, implementing the new infrastructure, and testing the new investment of $5.5M. The new system is able to produce most of the hot water needs for the painting booths with the reclaimed heat system, and is backed up with high efficiency hot water generators for high demand under certain weather conditions. We are able to save approximately 84,000 MMBTU and 4400 Metric tons of CO2 annually.