Variable Firing Rate Oil Burner Using Pulse Fuel Flow Control

摘要

The residential oil burner market is currently dominated by the pressure-atomized retention head burner, which has an excellent reputation for reliability and efficiency. In this burner, oil is delivered to a fuel nozzle at pressures from 100 to 150 psi. In addition, to atomizing the fuel, the small, carefully controlled size of the nozzle exit orifice serves to control the burner firing rate. Burners of this type are currently available at firing rates of more than 0.5 gallons-per-hour (70,000 Btu/hr). Nozzles have been made for lower firing rates, but experience has shown that such nozzles suffer rapid fouling of the necessarily small passages, leading to bad spray patterns and poor combustion performance. Also, traditionally burners and the nozzles are oversized to exceed the maximum demand. Typically, this is figured as follows. The heating load of the house on the coldest day for the location is considered to define the maximum heat load. The contractor or installer adds to this to provide a safety margin and for future expansion of the house. If the unit is a boiler that provides domestic hot water through the use of a tankless heating coil, the burner capacity is further increased. On the contrary, for a majority of the time, the heating system is satisfying a much smaller load, as only rarely do all these demands add up. Consequently, the average output of the heating system has to be much less than the design capacity and this is accomplished by start and stop cycling operation of the system so that the time-averaged output equals the demand. However, this has been demonstrated to lead to overall efficiencies lower than the steady-state efficiency. Therefore, the two main reasons for the current practice of using oil burners much larger than necessary for space heating are the unavailability of reliable low firing rate oil burners and the desire to assure adequate input rate for short duration, high draw domestic hot water loads. One approach to solve this problem is to develop a burner, which can operate at two firing rates, with the lower rate being significantly lower than 0.5 gallons per hour. This paper describes the initial results of adopting this approach through a pulsed flow nozzle.