As a design engineer responsible for developing and specifying boilers, dryers, furnaces, heaters, ovens and other industrial heating equipment, you face a daunting labyrinth of standards and industry regulations.

The walk-in oven has 4” thick insulated walls and an aluminized steel interior and exterior.  A four-port vacuum manifold, with pressure gauge and hand valve on each port, is included on the oven, as is a solenoid valve to bleed air into the manifold and a resin trap leading to the vacuum pump.

Boilers and heat exchangers are integral parts of many industrial plants. Often, when people think of protecting these components from corrosion, their minds fast-forward to corrosion issues that occur after the equipment is installed.

When the 2011 edition of the industrial ovens safety standard NFPA 86 was released, for the first time, safety programmable logic controllers (PLCs) were recognized as logic devices suitable for the safe operation of industrial heating equipment. The safety PLC could now perform the control logic, but it still could not directly control the combustion safeguard systems.

Most modern thermal fluid heaters at industrial plants are reliable, so unexplained heater shutdowns do not happen often. As a result, many plant operators do not know how to fix a shutdown problem — they have never encountered one in the past. But, eventually one does occur, and it is usually at the most inopportune time. This means the operator is under pressure to get the heater back in operation.

The transfer of heat from one fluid to another is an essential component of all chemical processes. Whether it is to cool down a chemical after it has been formed during an exothermic reaction, or to heat components before starting a reaction to make a final product, the thermal processing operation is core to the chemical process.

In the ever-evolving consumer economy, new technology is regularly transforming communication between buyers, sellers and manufacturers. In the consumer marketplace, buyers have unprecedented access to nearly any product imaginable.

A typical control approach for an industrial fired heater uses global measurements to keep the system efficient and within safe operating limits. Differences in combustion stoichiometry between individual burners, however, can cause global measurements to produce an incomplete picture of the combustion taking place within the heater.

Fluid-bed dryers offer an inherently efficient method of moisture removal that has not changed since the systems were developed in the 1950s. The introduction of ever-improving control technologies — personal computer-based and PLC control systems, smart sensors and other technological advances — in the last 40 years, however, has changed how process engineers operate their fluid-bed drying systems.

Rapid growth and innovation in the past decade have enabled companies to implement key technologies to monitor, analyze, control and automate their assets. Wireless resistance temperature detectors, or wireless RTDs, have bridged the gap from decades of hardware to remotely connected devices.