ACE plans to convert shale gas to heat

A Lancashire burner manufacturer says it's ready to convert shale gas into heat energy.

Advanced Combustion Engineering Ltd says applying its technical knowledge and application experience can turn the gas in to safe and usable heat energy for processes such as bakery and food processing, metal component manufacturing and finishing, textile dyeing and finishing.

The company was formed over 25 years ago to develop a range of gas and oil burners suitable for process heating. The process heating burner needs to have the ability to vary or modulate the amount of heat given to the process in a controlled and accurate manor to maintain the product quality.

Keeping the fuel and air quantities in a close ratio is important for the stability and efficiency of the burner as it varies the heat requirement to the temperature and production load requirements.

Burners that heat up space by heating large volumes of water or air have not been designed to modulate, they either work in a single on/off capacity or high/low in an effort to bring in some kind of control function.

In most cases the fuel rate is controlled but the combustion air requirement is set at the high fire rate, resulting in an oscillation of the temperature at set point. Typical proportioned bands can see an oscillation of +/- 10ºC or worse, coupled with an overall decrease in thermal efficiency.

ACE developed the fully modulating package burner from first principles to include unique features regarding fuel and air control. A series of tests carried out by external sources confirmed the practical results of a better than 20% increase in efficiency, for the ACE VJ series of modulating burners.