RoboVent air filters on the production floor.

RoboVent air filters on the production floor.

The Toyo Seat USA produces more than 3 million automotive seating components a year in the United States, including seat frames, tracks, recliners and miscellaneous hardware for automobiles, at facilities in Pelham, Tenn., Imlay City, Mich., and Flemingsburg, Ky., and has made about 1 million vehicle sets since 1988.

Managed by Jim Smith, who is a proponent of modern and effective air filtration systems to protects the company’s employees and equipment from dangerous gasses, smoke and fumes, Toyo Seat has taken an aggressive approach air filtration.

The company’s Pelham, Tenn., facility, started with no air filtration, and a new system had to be retrofitted to work with its existing manufacturing equipment.

The company chose the RoboVent FloorSaver air filtration units manufactured by Great Lakes Air Systems (www.robovent.com), for its welding cells, touch-up booths and plasma cutters.

“Space and flexibility are critical for us,” Smith said. “We needed something that would integrate into our weld cells and not tie into a central trunk system and something that would make layout changes easier to implement.”

“We chose the RoboVent system because the design was the best fit for our manufacturing systems,” Smith said. “Flexibility and space were big concerns for our facilities and RoboVent addressed both issues.”

Toyo Seat chose an over-cell design that minimizes consumption of floor space and changes to the facility’s layout.

“A central system or units that are not integrated into the cell, as ours were, would consume valuable floor space and be a barrier to efficiency,” said Smith.

RoboVent FloorSaver air filtration units mount directly on the top of the welding cell, use no ductwork and can be moved with the cell. The RoboVent captures nearly all of welding smoke and fumes as they are produced, and filters and cleans the air, then returns the clean air to the plant.

The RoboVent units at Toyo Seat use a hood that is mounted over the welding cell. The hood has a specially engineered spark arrester to prevent fires as it sucks air laden with smoke, welding dust and airborne particulates from the welding cell. The air travels through a duct to a self-contained collection and filtering unit that is on the floor next to the welding cell. The collection unit consists of a housing blower, motor, silencer, filter cartridges and a unique compressed air pulsing system to clean the filters.

The RoboVent collection unit uses a patented filtration process in which air flows in a downward path. This is unique to the RoboVent product and provides more efficient air cleaning. As the collection unit receives air from the hood, it immediately shifts the airflow 90 degrees downward through the filter elements where the air is cleaned. This causes separation and deposition of the larger, heavier smoke and welding dust particles, which reduces the load on the filter cartridges. The down flow of air within the collection unit reduces air turbulence and virtually eliminates re-entrainment, or re-blowing dust within the collection unit that has already been cleaned off of the filters, back onto the filters. Re-entrainment is the primary cause of short filter life.

“With the quality of welding we do, it is important to our employees and to Toyo Seat to maintain the healthiest environment possible,” said Smith. “For health and efficiency reasons, we can’t even imagine going back to a system without welding hoods.”

The RoboVent units use vertical filters, which are more efficient and have a much longer filter life than the horizontal filters used in most air filtration units. Vertical filters allow collected dust and debris to shed off the filter and fall directly down (with the direction of the RoboVent’s airflow) into the containment or collection tray when the filters are pulsed by the filter cleaning system.

Using horizontal filters is very inefficient, according to John Reid, president of Great Lakes Air Systems. “We’ve found that dirt and debris tends to fall off only the bottom two-thirds of a horizontal filter, rendering the top of the filter ineffective as it becomes clogged with debris,” he said. “This results in a 30 percent to 40 percent loss in filter area and a substantial reduction in filter life.”

The RoboVent has a proprietary filter cleaning system to keep filters clean and extend filter life. Each time the RoboVent unit shuts down; the automatic cleaning system sends a pulse of compressed air to blow debris off of the filters, keeping them clean. The debris falls downward (in the same direction as the downward airflow) into the collection tray, where maintenance personnel later remove it.

“RoboVent was very helpful in designing and constructing the supporting framework for the over-cell units we purchased,” said Smith. “I’m sure any company would benefit from the same advantages we’ve found.”

For additional information, contact Great Lakes Air at its website or at 888 762-6836.