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Show Introduction Development and Commercialization of an Advanced, Low-Emissions, Multi-Fuel Oxygen Burner By Curtis L. Taylor Maxon Corporation In the past few years, oxygen-fuel (oxy-fuel) combustion has been well documented as a proven method of reducing emissions in high temperature applications such as glass furnaces. The first generation of oxy-fuel burners was successful in reducing NOx emissions by as much as 90% compared to air-fuel bumers1,2. In addition, several factors including higher efficiencies, better product quality and lower capital costs have resulted in a marked increase recently in oxy-fuel activity. In these first generation burners, the method for reduction of NOx emissions has been simply the removal of as much nitrogen as possible from the combustion process. However, sources of nitrogen -- such as fuel bound nitrogen in heavy oils or natural gases and leakage of atmospheric air into melters -- were still present. In addition, the growing use of non-cryogenic, on-site oxygen generation has introduced another source of nitrogen. Oxygen generated by some on-site methods can contain nitrogen at approximately 5% of total volume. While oxy-fuel combustion has provided excellent emissions results versus air-fuel combustion, these remaining sources of nitrogen have prevented greater reductions in emissions from being realized. This, along with more stringent environmental regulations on the horizon, emphasized the need to move beyond the basic oxy-fuel burner. In order to obtain further emissions reductions, burner technology needed to advance and address these additional sources of NO x emissions. In this paper, the development and commercialization of a next generation oxy-fuel burner, Maxon OXY-THERM® LE (U.S. and foreign patents pending), will be reported. The results of the first large-scale burner comparison test on a production melter in the United States will be presented. As a result of this test, two container furnaces were converted to utilize this new burner technology, and their status will be reported. Due to the success of the OXY -THERM burner in glass applications, potential non-glass applications for oxy-fuel combustion will also be explored. Brief History Since 1982, Maxon Corporation has supplied over 400 oxy-fuel burners on more than 60 total furnace conversions (Table 1). Prior to 1990, a majority of these burners were supplied to Coming for use in the conversion of Coming facilities worldwide. The variety of these early applications provided an invaluable amount of customer feedback. During that time, several iterations to the original Maxon OXY -THERM® burner were implemented as applications experience increased. The maj ority of these changes |