During the day-to-day operation of heat treat departments, many habits are formed and procedures followed that sometimes are done simply because that’s the way they’ve always 
been done. One of the great benefits of having a community of heat treaters is to challenge those habits and look at new ways of doing things. Heat Treat Today‘s 101 Heat Treat Tips, tips and tricks that come from some of the industry’s foremost experts, were initially published in the FNA 2018 Special Print Edition, as a way to make the benefits of that community available to as many people as possible. This special edition is available in a digital format here.
In today’s Technical Tuesday, we continue an intermittent series of posts drawn from the 101 tips. The category for this post is Combustion, and today’s tip is #23.
Combustion
Heat Treat Tip #23
Burner adjustment to nominal gas and air ratios is a typical component of your combustion equipment maintenance. However, this process cannot be minimized in importance as any adjustment can affect operation, efficiency, exhaust emissions & equipment life. Factors to consider and address during any burner adjustment:
- Burner adjustment should always be done when possible at normal furnace operating temperature under typical production to maintain best conditions for final calibration.
- Provide clean combustion air: maintain blower filter & consider the source of any plant air.
- An increase of gas may not increase power to the system due to heat transfer or throughput issues.
- A decrease in combustion air will not create a hotter flame or add power to the system as this may only create a gas-rich operation resulting in reduced power and CO in the exhaust.
- Verify gas & combustion supply pressures & consider creating a monthly log of incoming pressures.
- While a visual inspection of flame can help to verify operation or proper combustion, burner gas /air adjustment can not accurately be performed by simply looking at color or size of a flame.
- A working understanding of burner system is important to determine and verify values to gas/air and excess O² to a specific application.
This tip was submitted by WS Thermal.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact the expert who submitted the Tip or contact Heat Treat Today directly. If you have a heat treat tip that you’d like to share, please send to the editor, and we’ll put it in the queue for our next Heat Treat Tips issue.
