Burner Lockout Problem in Heating Step: Water Bath Heater

What is Water Bath Heater

The main application for Indirect Fired Water Bath Heaters is to heat high pressure gas prior to pressure reduction, this prevents hydrate formation that can occur because of the temperature drop due to the Joule Thomson effect. The natural gas can also be post heated to suit the operation of gas turbines.

A typical water bath heater consists of an insulated shell, removable process coil, removable fire tube, stack burner, gas train and control system. (Courtesy GASCO)

We were assigned a job regarding a water bath heater of a natural gas processing plant. It was tripping due to burner lockout problem during heating step.

The problem was found actually in the AFR (Air to Fuel Ratio) controller. It was a manual controller. It was found that its seed was actually blocked with wax. We took that seed out, cleaned it and reinstalled it and it worked perfectly since then.


Remember that we were using UV based flame detector which was tripping the heater again and again because of a very small flame. The flame was smaller because its path was not totally cleared (due to wax in the seed of AFR controller).