Jason Swadick
Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Texas | Senior Engineer, Paint Engineering – Paint Pilot Projects
Speaker
Track C: Alternative and Renewable Energy
Session C2: New Technologies
September 26, 2024 | 9:00 am - 9:30 am
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.
Speaker Bio
Jason Swadick is a Senior Engineer at TMMTX, located in San Antonio, TX, employs over 3800 team members and manufactures the Toyota Tundra pickup trucks and Sequoia Sport Utility Vehicles.. He has received two awards from AEE in previous years, and nominated again this year.
Mr. Swadick, originally from Michigan where he worked for a Paint Robotic Integrator traveled to different plants across North America learning the most efficient Automotive Painting methods. He then utilized his experience and training working for Toyota at NUMMI in California in 2008 until transferred to Texas at TMMTX. He has 21 years of experience in Automotive Painting.
Mr. Swadick utilizes his skills and the Toyota Production System (TPS) training to improve system operations for the TMMTX paint operations. He applies the basic tenant of TPS to “use what you need, where you need it, in the amount you need” and focuses on removing “muda” or inefficiency from all processes through the application of “kaizen”.
