DCS-Based Burner Management Course

General Services Administration: DCS-Based Burner Management Course

Effective boiler operation enhances plant personnel’s ability to maximize boiler safety, efficiency, and reliability. By clearly understanding the operations of the Burner Management System (BMS), specific control schemes, and interlock logic, as well as the Distributed Control System (DCS) interface, plant operators will be in an optimum position to control the boiler. This knowledge enables them to operate the boiler safely and recognize, diagnose, and troubleshoot emergency conditions, thereby minimizing unsafe and unreliable operations.

FCS developed a plant-specific course on under-standing burner control and interlock logic for boiler control operators at the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Central Heating Plant. The Central Heating Plant has an installed steam capacity of 1.6 million pounds per hour of heating steam. This course was developed for a Burner Management System integrated into the plant’s Bailey Infi 90 Distributed Control System, and is geared specifically to enable plant operators to perform their jobs more effectively, thereby improving plant reliability and availability.

The need for this course was identified as a result of excessive boiler trips caused by the BMS during boiler startup. Typically, such incidents required Electrical and Controls technicians to troubleshoot the root cause of the trips. By providing this training, GSA has provided boiler control operators with the knowledge to anticipate and evaluate most BMS trips and take appropriate action to improve boiler reliability and availability.

The objectives of the course were:

• Train plant operations and controls personnel to read and interpret Bailey Controls Logic Diagrams
• Train plant personnel in the operational design of the Burner Management System, explaining why the system logic is important to safe and reliable operation of the boilers and the protection philosophy implemented in the BMS

• Train plant personnel to interpret Event Log printouts so they can effectively troubleshoot burner manage-ment system malfunctions using the Event Logs and interlock logic diagrams
• Train plant personnel to respond to boiler emergencies

An important feature of the course was the exercises trainees completed during class. These exercises were based on actual plant scenarios involving boiler trips that the trainees analyze, using the control logic drawings to determine the root cause of boiler trips. In addition to learning how to use actual Bailey logic drawings, the trainees also use simplified logic block diagrams to more quickly comprehend protection and control schemes used in the Bailey BMS, as shown in the figure below.

This course can be customized to support the specific BMS configuration implemented at your plant. FCS has experience providing similar training for a wide range of boiler and turbine control systems provided by Westinghouse, Foxboro, and Siemens, in addition to Bailey Controls.