Our food and beverage customer approached us seeking support with reducing energy usage and downtime when a fault occurred. Their plant consisted of AHU and process burners utilising both direct and indirect burner units.
We advised that the customer upgraded to our SP burners with spilt manifolds so the customer can run utilising 50% of the burner head in the summer for better temperature control and more turn down, allowing for less gas usage. Then, in the winter, utilise the full duty of the burner head when the extreme weather conditions occur. The SP burners were fitted with flame relays to allow flame supervision on both sides of the heads to ensure cross-lighting.
Due to the challenging locations of the existing units, the new burner control panels were fitted with additional relays to increase the customer's integration from the burners to the PLC. This enabled more information to be available during the operation of the burners. This allowed the customer to see burner interlocks from the control room without having to exit the building or entering the roof space. Alongside this, the new Fireye burner pro control box with a Modbus connection was fitted to the burners. This allows the customer to see the live sequence from burner enable to ignition and on to the main flame. Additionally, the customer can monitor run signals, lockout faults, fault codes and flame signals for easier diagnoses.
Conclusion -
The reason behind the project was so that the customer could reduce fan speeds on the AHU(Air Handling Units) to decrease energy usage when little or no temperature was needed, this is where the split manifold design from Comtherm came into its own. In addition to this is was expressed they needed to decrease their downtime when a burner fault occurred. By installing the new control boxes and relays the customer could get an instant update on the burner's running conditions without having to instruct a member of staff to investigate at the burner itself.
