For more than two decades, sintered metal fibers have been widely used in the combustion industry as gas burners for boilers, water heaters, ovens, cooking equipment, air drying and other general process heating applications. In contrast to diffusion-flame burners like the Bunsen gas burner, metal fiber burners introduce premixed air and gas into a plenum to produce uniform, short flames. By precisely controlling the ratio between air and gas, the engineers are capable of designing a metal fiber burner for either rich or lean combustion.

When used for lean combustion, metal fiber burners use a large amount of excess air to keep the flame temperature low enough to avoid the formation of nitrous oxide (NO_X pollutants). Metal fiber burners are commonly used for low NO_X applications where emissions are strictly regulated. For other uses such as infrared gas heating, the burner requires a near stoichiometric mixing of air and gas for best efficiency, yet the burner remains a low NO_X emission unit due to heat absorption by the metal fibers.