Training diary – Harry Holmes

Harry Holmes, Trainee Technical Engineer at EOGB, describes his experience of attending the EOGB commercial burner training course at Baltur in Italy…

 

I thoroughly enjoyed the commercial burner training course at Baltur’s training facility.

Firstly, I was impressed and overwhelmed by the size and quality of the training and development facilities as they were unlike anything I have come across before.

The huge cooling towers in the facility allowed us to fire the large commercial burners continuously. This really allowed me to improve my knowledge and confidence as we had time to make adjustments to the burners and observe the changes in combustion figures, without the worry that boiler would reach temperatures and then having a long wait until the heat load was suitable. Having the time to play with the combustion really helped me understand the combustion process better.

We started the week with some underpinning combustion knowledge before getting stuck straight into the practical side of things, working with single stage On/Off burners and then progressing onto two-stage High/Low operating burners. We covered gas valve set up through to taking gas rates to match the burner to the boiler. This vastly improved my knowledge of how to commission burners to a high standard.

We then spent some time working on the pre-mix gas burners. This was the first time I had come across these, so it was interesting to gain some experience on them.  We then progressed onto mechanically, electronically and pneumatically controlled burners. This gave us a good variety of ranges that we could come across on site. All the time we were learning Baltur’s recommended set-up procedures. We covered a variety of sizes of burners with outputs ranging from 50KW to 2000KW.  We then finished the week with the ‘O2 trim’ and ‘CO trim’ burner systems. I was really impressed with the level of technology that is involved and despite the complex process that was taking part, Baltur’s burners and equipment made it simple to understand and set-up.

It was a great week that vastly improved my practical experience as well as my theoretical experience of burners. I must thank Martin Cooke, Baltur’s Lorenzo Mestieri and the other technical team members of Baltur, they were all a massive help with my training development. I’d recommend the course to any engineer looking to increase their knowledge and practical experience with variety of commercial burners.