Fired Heater Control

Large industrial complexes often have many fired heaters, making broad-based competency in this area essential to overall reliability, safety and energy efficiency. Despite industry’s widespread familiarity with fired heaters, they continue to pose many common challenges in reliable operation and control.

APC 1.0 made the situation more complicated and less reliable by dividing heater controlled variables (CVs) between the BPC and APC layers. The most fundamental consequence of this compromise has been the use of the temperature controller as the primary MV rather than direct multivariable control of the fuel gas valve itself.

Now APC 2.0, i.e. APC in the base-layer, can streamline multivariable heater control in one high-speed high-availability multivariable control application deployed at the control layer to increase fired heater control performance and reliability.

Read about heater control by APC Performance LLC in Chemical Engineering magazine.