Will you be caught out by the new safety standard?
March 1st 2006

The Gas Appliance Directive, EN298 and EN12067-2 are the European safety standards for electronic fuel:air ratio control and controls on gas fired industrial burners.

These Standards have been upgraded to provide additional safeguards that are intended to reduce risk of explosion and other hazards due to faults occurring during or after a lock-out / safety shutdown of the gas burner or when two consecutive faults occur.

September 30th is the agreed implementation date for the revised Standard EN298-2003 as agreed by formal vote of the member states of the European Union. In January 2006 there is no known industrial burner control that meets the new Standard: EN298 -2003.

During the next few weeks the date of implementation and the phasing of EN298-2003 is to be ratified and with the exception of spares for existing installations, it is likely to be illegal to sell or install new industrial gas burners with controls not meeting EN298 -2003.

The industry has had 3 years to design products that comply.

And those companies that have invested in research and development will be able to offer new, state-of-the-art products with improved safety performance.

Energy Technology and Control is one such company and has spent this time designing and proving a new control that has many self checking and failsafe features that satisfies the increased safety requirements of the new standard. They expect approval of their ETC6000 Integrated burner control next month. Samples will be available for trials by burner manufacturers interested in meeting the new Standards.

One benefit of choosing a new control is that advances in electronics usually result in lower prices, smaller size and more versatility than ever before. Safety is enhanced and Best Practice achieved at lower cost. Industrial process control is improved.

Energy savings are realised and emissions lowered. In fact burner design is no longer limited by control functions and new designs of burners should emerge that will produce lower and lower emissions. In January of this year one manufacturer has successfully reduced NOx emissions on industrial gas burners to less than 5 ppm.

Of serious concern is the possibility that the above introduction date for the new Standard will catch some manufacturers out as there is little time left to make the change to a new control. As a first step manufacturers are urged to contact their controls supplier to see if they will offer a compliant control before the due date.

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