Fired Heater Safety Standards and Burner Management

In an earlier post, Safety System Considerations for Process Fired Heaters, I highlighted an American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) paper by Emerson’s Nikki Bishop and Dave Sheppard. In this post, I’ll share the safety system design, selection and estimated savings in startup time reductions from the paper. The authors note that safety instrumented systems [...]
  • In your design of Natural Gas Fired Heater Burner Management System what would you consider the Pre Ignition Interlocks needed for Safe Burner light Off starting with the most important one first?
  • Hi Steve, Here's some feedback I received. "Assuming the fired heater is greater than 12,500,000 Btu/hr, I would recommend looking at NFPA 87, specifically chapter 8 which would deal with the safety equipment and its application to the fluid heater heating system. That chapter lays out what is required and what is recommended for the BMS. I can go through and list the interlocks it calls out, but without knowing what the system looks like, I’d be listing items that may or may not be applicable. As to what would be the most important, that’s a bit like asking what your favorite brick in a wall would be. They all are equally important to the burner safety system and, if called out by NFPA 87, required by the best practices surrounding the heater."