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DOWA Thermotech Co., Ltd.

Reduction of CO₂ emission is one of the important themes of DOWA Thermotech for sustaibable business, contribution to society and to garner trust from society.

We implemented energy saving thermal treatment facilities, and our industrial furnace department has been engaged in developing reliable thermal treatment facilities that could contribute to reducing CO₂ emission.

We established a thermal treatment plant in Shanghai, China as a manufacturing base of industrial furnaces in July last year, and Kunshan Dowa Thermo Furnace Co., Ltd. So, we accelerated deployment of our business activities on a global basis.

At the same time, domestically, we are promoting our efforts to reduce industrial wastes from our plants, including recycling of waste from shot blast powders and used oil and will continue our efforts for further reduction.

president Toshiro Sumida

Address: 1-12 Shiohi-cho, Handa-shi, Aichi Prefecture, 475-0032
Employees: 77 (as of the end of March 2011)

Chukyo Handa Plant is specialized in thermal treatment called carburizing and quenching mainly for automobile parts. We use the gas carburizing method where carbon is added to the surface of steel to strengthen metal parts for a longer life. Recent increased performance of automobiles has demanded for better quality, higher performance and lighter weight of automobile parts. We offer reliable thermal treatment services with high accuracy and stable quality, leveraging on our technologies long esteemed in our history.

We are the largest thermal treatment plant in the Chukyo District with 31 furnaces installed. As most of the equipment here is automated and centrally controlled with computers, human errors are reduced to minimum. Materials are taken out from the warehouse, delivered to the plant and fed into furnaces all in an automated manner, contributing to energy saving.

Thermal treatment requires a large amount of energy (electricity and city gas) throughout the year. Therefore, we regard energy saving as one of our important themes and strive to save energy through the change of fuel sources and planned production adjustment. We also strive to save energy from the software standpoint through optimized combination of furnaces that have different processes, depending on required quantity and quality (depth of carburizing) of products that need thermal treatment.

Even small parts are target of our energy saving activities. A small pilot burner is always burning in a furnace to spread flame called “curtain”, so that the atmosphere inside the furnace is not mixed with the atmosphere outside the furnace when the furnace door is used. We have many furnaces with such pilot burners and these burners are burning almost 24 hours a day. Even a small reduction of burner flame contributes to significant energy saving. More importantly, if flame of a pilot burner fails to ignite the curtain, there is a risk of explosion. We have been promoting improvement of burners, paying attention to safety and succeeded in reducing the size of some pilot burners. Now we are considering improving the pilot burners in other furnaces.

Fumon Kamisugi, Manager of the Production Technology Division, Handa Plant

Handa Plant is classified as Class 1 energy control plant. Here the processing sections and works together strive to reduce energy use to achieve annual energy reduction objectives. We expect this effort will contribute to energy saving to a great extent, as Handa Plant uses a great amount of gas. We will continue to raise awareness of our employees on energy saving by visualizing energy usage.

We set up a board called the “Morning Market” and share information on the board before the leaders meeting every morning. Leaders bring topics, issues and important matters back to their sections and discuss them among employees. This effort is successful in promoting information sharing among employees, quality improvement and risk prevention. In an organization, increased awareness of each individual will improve productivity of the whole organization. We will continue be in the forefront of active information sharing.

Hideki Hayashida, Assistant Plant Manager, Hand Plant

The Morning Market is a place where everybody brings up problems and issues for discussing them. Handa Plant implemented this Morning Market activity three years ago as a catchphrase to prevent quality problems from happening and spreading. Recently Equipment Malfunction Control, Flow Change Point Control, Characteristic Transition Diagram Control and Production Output Control boards have been added. We are making efforts to implement comprehensive operational control every day. As a result, we achieved 52% reduction of defective products last year. Among other concerns, we achieved reduction of problems caused by emergency equipment shutdown by 84%. All I all, it took three years for these all-hands activities to take root in our organization.

Recently environmental issues have been diversified and the expectations of the society towards corporate activities are significantly changing, including corporate measures for environmental issues such as global warming and eco-friendly business deployment. The Agreement on Conservation of Environment was executed between Handa City and us on February 22, 2011 for the purpose of clarifying the responsibility and role of our company as well as reducing environmental loads associated with our business activities to respond to the changing awareness of the society of environmental issues.