12-Burner Amine Cabin Heater Burner Management Retrofit

The Profire Solution

Profire built 12 independent burner management systems onto a single heater. Each burner received its own PF3100 controller, its own fuel train, and its own temperature control valve, so it could be purged, lit, proved, modulated, and shut down on its own.

Independent control is what made burner voting possible. The heater keeps running as long as 9 of the 12 burners are proved, and losing a fourth brings the system down. The tower keeps getting heat and the plant keeps running while a technician deals with the burner during normal hours.

Before anything went to the field, Profire pulled one burner out of the heater and set it up in the shop, testing pilot ignition and flame propagation into the mains, tuning the burner, and cleaning up the nozzles. That testing produced the ignition and modulation parameters behind the final design, including the 8 psi operating pressure that replaced the 25 to 28 psi the site had been running.

The temperature that mattered sat 380 feet from the heater, at the amine tower outlet. Profire installed a quad thermocouple there and split the redundant signals across redundant networks, so no single instrument or network path can take away the measurement the burners modulate against.

Ensign had one party accountable for the design intent, from the first drawing to the running heater.

Key elements included:

• 12 independent PF3100 systems: One controller, one fuel train, and one temperature control valve per burner.
• Power distribution and network panels: Two additional enclosures for power distribution, network, and I/O cards, including the signal path from the amine tower thermocouple.
• Burner voting logic: A nine of 12 vote holds the heater in service through the loss of up to three burners.
• Redundant temperature measurement: A quad thermocouple at the amine tower outlet, with redundant signals carried on redundant networks.
• Shop burner testing: Pilot ignition and flame propagation into the mains validated before field deployment.
• Plant integration: Modbus communication to the plant DCS, with 250+ safety I/O visible in the control room.
• Single-source execution: Front-end engineering, procurement, fabrication, installation, commissioning, and ongoing preventative maintenance under one scope.
• First-Out Annunciation: Immediate notification of shutdown, alarm, and start permissive conditions, with data and event logging for sharing control and safety information.

The Results

Ensign reported fuel gas savings of more than 45% after startup. Proper gas regulation and modulating control on each of the 12 burners let the heater run at 8 psi rather than 25 to 28, and ROI came in under eight months.

With independent temperature control on each burner working from redundant measurement at the outlet, the plant holds the amine tower outlet within 2°F (1°C), closer to setpoint than Ensign’s team had been able to run it before.

The manual relights stopped. Automatic ignition and relights on every burner mean the system proves and relights a burner that drops out, without an operator making the drive. In the first six months after commissioning, the site logged one callout, and it came from a plant generator failure rather than from the burner management system.

The heater now runs with per-burner flame supervision, a defined ignition and shutdown sequence, and a documented safety interlock chain. The gas savings is the number that gets quoted. For Ensign’s operations and engineering teams, the day-to-day change is that losing a burner is now a maintenance item instead of a plant event.