Fireye 45RM4-1001 Flame Scanner for Pulverized Coal & Low-NOx Burner Applications

Application Scenarios

A 600 MW coal-fired power plant in the Midwest was battling chronic nuisance trips on its pulverized-coal burners. The existing flame detectors could not reliably distinguish the target burner flame from the intense infrared glow of adjacent flames and hot refractory walls. The result: false “flame present” signals during ignition, followed by hard trips when the detector briefly lost sight of the flame — disrupting steam production and costing the plant an estimated $18,000 per unplanned trip in lost generation.

The plant’s combustion engineering team retrofitted the boiler front with the 45RM4-1001. Its 16-position rotary frequency selector let technicians tune the scanner precisely to the low-frequency flicker signature of pulverized coal combustion — a range where the flame-on to flame-off signal ratio was strongest. The large-area PbS cell resisted “washout” from high background brightness, while the BGC function ensured the flame signal decreased when the monitored flame went out, even as refractory glow increased. The 10-segment LED bargraph simplified alignment, cutting commissioning time by more than half. Most importantly, the electronic self-checking shutter — driven by pulses from the existing 25SU5 amplifier — verified scanner integrity on every cycle; a failed shutter or blocked optical path could never produce a false “flame present.” Over the following 18 months, nuisance trips on the retrofitted burners dropped to zero, and the plant reported a 22% reduction in forced outages attributed to flame-detection issues.

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