ProcessApex Fired Heaters
In many manufacturing and production complexes energy cost represents the largest share of the annual operating cost. Fuel for the heaters, boilers, and furnaces is likely the main component of these energy costs. Fired heaters are also subject to environmental emissions regulations; the violation of which can result in significant fines and penalties. Process plants today may have a wider variation in heat content of the fuel than in the past, due to greater efforts to recover and reclaim energy sources, and switching fuel sources based on price. This variation requires closer attention to and more frequent adjustment of operating parameters. Perhaps the most important aspect of fired heater operation is safe operation of the asset. Being aware of the critical parameters and quickly diagnosing the root cause of abnormal behavior is an essential part of an energy asset performance program.
Real-Time Results Tracking
ExperTune's ProcessApex helps you evaluate, monitor, and diagnose your fired heater assets. Some of the metrics available for this component include: efficiency, excess oxygen, heat loss, and operating costs.
Efficiency
With ProcessApex, you will have up-to-the-minute efficiency information. You can immediately identify when efficiency drops, and track down the root cause.
Excess Oxygen
You can monitor excess oxygen to ensure that you are operating at the best possible air-to-fuel ratio. Too little excess oxygen, and you have a safety risk. Too much, and you are wasting energy to heat extra air. ProcessApex keeps on eye on your excess oxygen, so you know exactly how to adjust process setpoints.
Heat Loss
No process is completely efficient. Do you measure your heat losses? Do you know when it changes? ProcessApex knows. Using fuel flows and process temperatures, ProcessApex can determine the extent of your heat losses. Use this information to make process improvements, justify process changes or equipment upgrades.
Powerful Reporting
Some of the assessments are designed to provide "what-if" or potential opportunity values. For heaters an often requested diagnostic is how much fuel could we save if we operated closer to the stack oxygen target. ProcessApex calculates this value as a percent of fuel savings and as a monetary value. Another question that often gets asked of process/operations engineers is why something is not operating where expected. Sometimes this is simply that the equipment has reached some limit. These limits (multiple) can be configured for each component and the assessment is available to any user. All fired heater metrics are also maintained in a historian for trending. Again, this comes in handy when performing de-bottlenecking studies.
In addition to providing technical performance information there are reporting features designed to make it easy to compare assets locally or across the enterprise. One of these is the Benchmarking display. This display shows an asset performance metric against those of the same type. This can be used to support or identify opportunities for capital investments. This type of comparison might also be used to evaluate different technical solutions. A process heater may be designed in many ways to provide basic heat transfer. Things like coil arrangement, insulation type, controls design, preheat technique, and tube coatings are items that may provide advantages to a particular process.
Accurate, Useful Analysis
The ideas behind each of the ProcessApex components are:
- Consistent calculations
- Easily accessed information
- Create a historical record
- Enable faster decisions
- Identify opportunities for improvement
- Value the opportunity when possible
Please contact us if you would like additional information, also if you have specific metrics you would be interested in for a particular component.