Often when we talk about flares process, and piping disciplines with support from instrumentation and electrical disciplines come to the limelight.
While there is plenty of material available for main disciplines, Electrical part is not found unless we experience it. And to a beginner this should help.
Electrical is mainly involved in ignition part of flares. Ignition of flares can happen in many ways; however, always some electrical pulse is generated through ignition LV/HV transformer.
So always there is this LCP or Local control Panel with all control and monitoring functions for flare, which can either be combined or two – one each for primary and secondary ignition.
Electrical engineer must power this LCP which will intern supply the power to the ignition transformer. From the ignition transformer HE or HV cables run to the pilot where the rods receive a spark/pulse from ignition transformer.
The location of LCP mostly is in the main platform and the subsea (in case of flare tower for offshore) LV cable runs to ignition transformer Box kept of flare tower Base. This flare Tower could be 1kM away from the platform connected by a subsea cable piggy backing the subsea pipeline for fuel.
The ignition transformer box is connected to flare JB both at the base and tip of the flare tower where the pilot is located.
Here are talking of a load of around 1kW approximately only if there are no Heaters or Heat tracing elements/part to it.
Therefore, aways LCP is located from where you flare and have access and control the flare. Ignition boxes are always located at the base of flare tower/stack, and HV/HE cable run after ignition transformer to the pilot rods through JBs.
Most of the times electrical engineer role is to power the LCP. Rest of the part is managed by the flare vendor.
But electrical engineer depending on the stage of the job/project must generate deliverables after receiving the inputs from flare vendors and provide an MTO for cost estimate.
This is not to miss that there is lot of process and pipeline elements to it and discussions like radiation study, whether to replace flare tip and others form the other discipline concerns.
Also, there is this ignition monitoring system aspect to flares, and electrical engineer must ensure that power is available for whichever system is used for monitoring.
Please refer to some available E&I block diagrams for flares for clarity.
Please note above is related to Automatic ignition of flares where we don’t vent gas when not possible to flare and help sustainability.
I hope it helped.
