Becht Engineering Company, Inc. provides expert consulting services in the areas of fired
heater process and mechanical design, energy use improvements, and troubleshooting. Becht's senior
specialists in fired heaters include Charles W. Conklin, PE, John L Worth, PE and Al McIntyre, PE,
all of whom have worked for long careers at major oil companies and served in leadership positions
on ASME and API committees during the preparation of current standards for the design and operation
of process heaters and boilers. In addition, Leonard Krawitz, PE and Al McIntyre, PE, have many
years of design, startup and troubleshooting experience with high temperature ethane/propane
pyrolysis furnaces used in the production of olefins. These and other Becht experts work frequently
with and also helped develop ASME Codes and Standards. Becht Engineering is also an expert in
elevated temperature design. Dr. Charles Becht IV, is a member and former chair of the ASME Boiler
and Pressure Vessel Code Subgroup on Elevated Temperature Design.
Becht’s staff have performed numerous designs, design reviews, operations analyses, and
troubleshooting of fired process heater and steam boiler systems in areas as diverse as fuel
efficiency comparisons, burner design and operation, heater tube design and failure analysis,
support structure, refractory design and failure, stack design, stack vibration
troubleshooting, burner instrumentation and stack gas analysis, NOX reduction, excess
air management, air preheat, economizers, foundation design, all aspects of fired heater
design, construction and operation.
Becht’s fired heater engineers are also are expert in the use of the rigorous fired
heater/boiler simulation software licensed by PFR Engineering, PFRN-5. This program permits
review of existing fired heater design and operation for areas of improvement as well as in
the design of new fired heaters or boilers or additions to existing fired heaters such as
higher stacks or more convection section heat transfer surface to improve fuel use
efficiency.
Becht’s experts can and have examined the site of heater failures immediately after the
incident with the goal of independently assessing the damage and likely causes of the
incident and making remedial recommendations.
Here are some project examples:
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- Evaluation of an existing fired boiler using PFRN heater rating program
- NOX and CO emissions reduction from very large process heater
- Package boiler specifications for far east sugar refinery
- Inspection and report after fired heater explosion
- Expert witness on fired heater burner design
- Tuning of many fired heaters in existing refinery
- Rigorous analysis of various fuel type efficiencies in fired heaters
- Design of more efficient replacement convection section
- Design of improvements to fired heater draft
- Inspection of fabrication of very large high efficiency burners prior to
delivery to plant site
- Procedures for decoking of fired heaters
- Review and projection of tube life of existing fired heater
- Modeling of crude and vacuum heaters to evaluate coking
- Economizer design to reduce existing boiler NOX
- Structural assessment and reinforcement of furnace and boiler enclosures
damaged by internal overpressure events
- Troubleshooting and correction of stack vibration for fired heaters and
boilers
- Design of new furnace tube supports for longer life and improved
performance at elevated temperatures
- Assessment of vendor’s proposed new low NOX burners
- Identified significant process, energy and reliability improvements that
could be achieved in several steam reformers for a major European petrochemical company
that could result in greater than $30 million annual savings
- Identified many energy improvement opportunities that have led to
substantial energy savings in fired equipment, often with low or no capital cost
- Troubleshooting of steam cracking furnace tube failures
- Assessment of technology improvements for steam cracking furnaces for
ethylene plants
- Post fire assessment of fired heater fitness for continued operation
- Performed a post incident investigation of a fired heater that exploded,
resulting in a fatality
- Corrected downstream piping vibration problems due to two phase flow for
process units such as crude heaters
- Development of Owner Engineering Standards for hydrogen reformers
- Design review of hydrogen plant reformers
- Troubleshooting of hydrogen plant reformers
- Consulting on tube metallurgy for severe service applications.
- Reliability assessment of waste heat recovery equipment for an FCC.
- Risk assessment of fired heater installation for heating pipeline natural
gas
- Boiler vendor qualification via shop visit and review of design
calculations.
- Structural and ASME calculation review for ABSA approval of fired heaters
- Design of replacement boiler stacks
- Identified the root cause of tube to mud drum leaks as due to original
fabrication errors, inadequate preheat to drive off moisture between the tube and mud
drum from an original hydrotest, after which the tubes were seal welded. A combination
of subsequent events resulted in stress corrosion cracking around the tube holes
- Performed detailed assessments of water wall boilers used as flue gas coolers
in fluid catalytic cracking units including acoustic resonance, vortex shedding, and
turbulent buffeting
- Designed water sprays ahead of the waste heat boiler for a fluid catalytic
cracking unit, that permit continued operation when the high pressure module is out of
service. These sprays have been successfully used a number of times
- Identified the root cause of cracking failures in boiler construction as due
to the insufficient consideration of differential thermal expansion, and designed a variety
of corrections that prevented further cracking
- Project Engineer responsible for HRSGs for cogeneration plant
- Preparation of specifications for procurement of new superheater sections
for boilers
- Updated Oil Refiner’s fired heater operating standards after survey of
best practices within a group of operating companies
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