Improvement of hot work environment in the curing processes of a tire manufacturing company

Generally, the tire curing process is the process in which the sulfur is added and subsequently the tire is heated to give the tire elasticity. In this process, all kinds of the chemicals in the tire are emitted with a lot of heat. The chemical fume and heat aggravate the work environment. To solve this problem, 92 local exhaust ventilators and 8 gravity ventilators were used, but not satisfactory yet. Preliminary survey showed that the temperatures in the process were very high: 30.3, 32.9 and $37.2^{\circ}C$ at 2, 4 and 6m above the ground level, respectively in the winter (outside temperature was $2^{\circ}C$). It can be imagined that the process is severely hot in the summer time. The higher temperature distribution in the higher space tells us that the hot plume could not be removed with the existing ventilation systems. Therefore, in this study, some alternative ventilation systems were designed. The partitions were used to contain the hot plume to increase the capture efficiency. The gravity ventilators were newly designed to improve the extraction efficiency of hot fume. To satisfy the balance of pressure in the curing process, some supply air system was introduced by renewing the existing air conditioning system. Many alternative solutions were evaluated by using computational fluid dynamics modelling. The best and applicable solution was selected and the existing ventilation system was modified. After implementing the new ventilation system, the hot environment was much improved. The temperature reduction in the curing process was about $6.4^{\circ}C$.

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