DUNPHY COMBUSTION: Six Decades of Fire, Now Burning Greener
Dunphy Combustion has been pioneering design, manufacture, and installation across industrial burner and boilers and industrial control systems for decades. Using vast experience in its team, the company has developed a new dual fuel system that can switch between hydrogen and natural gas. The result is the highest honour the country can bestow on business, and MD Sharon Kuligowski is proud of what Dunphy is doing.
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Interview with Sharon Kuligowski, Managing Director
There is a particular kind of credibility that only time can build. Dunphy Combustion has been manufacturing industrial combustion equipment from its base in Rochdale since 1964 — founded by Malcolm Dunphy, incorporated as a limited company in 1971, and run today by next generation Managing Director, Sharon Kuligowski, who has worked through every department the business has. The story of Dunphy is not one of venture capital, pivots, or rapid acquisition. It is one of patient, vertically integrated manufacturing expertise, accumulated across six decades and now, in a remarkable chapter for a family-owned firm, recognised at the highest level in British enterprise.
The product at the centre of Dunphy’s recent trajectory is a simultaneous-firing natural gas and hydrogen burner — a development that took five years to engineer, passed full firing trials at the company’s own factory and at sites including Kellogg’s in Manchester and Unilever on the Wirral, and ultimately earned the company a King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation in 2025. “This innovative burner can seamlessly switch between hydrogen and natural gas, addressing critical safety and performance challenges. By enabling the safe and efficient use of hydrogen alongside conventional fuels, our solution supports the broader global drive towards industrial decarbonisation,” says Kuligowski. That award — among the most prestigious recognitions available to a British business — sits alongside the company’s earlier Technological Queen’s Award in 2010 for ultra-low NOx combustion technology, demonstrating fifteen years of sustained innovation in a field where incremental progress is the norm and genuine breakthroughs are rare.
Kuligowski has been Managing Director for 18 years, following education in applied mathematics and a journey in the company through the drawing office, mechanical and electrical design, quotations, servicing and marketing and sales. Today, the Dunphy brand is recognised as a leader in manufacturing of combustion equipment for heat and steam generation: burners, ancillary burner equipment, gas boosters, oil pumps, gas valves, burner heads, fans — most of it made in-house.
“We have always been self-sufficient and that has been a key selling point because we keep everything inhouse to retain quality standards,” she says. Vertical integration, in a manufacturing sector where supply chain disruption has become a defining risk, is not a philosophy at Dunphy, it is a competitive strategy.
The physical infrastructure to match that ambition has been built deliberately. A new 4,000 square metre factory was opened in 2014. In 2020, as the pandemic began, construction started on a further 4,000 square metre site purpose-built for plant rooms — a tangible expression of the strategic shift that Kuligowski had been driving for over a decade. Rather than supplying burners as a sub-contractor to main contractors further up the chain, Dunphy repositioned itself as a turnkey supplier. “As a burner manufacturer, we traditionally come into a project further down the chain,” Kuligowski explains. “We tried to move the focus onto the burner manufacturer as that is the brains of the installation. We approached consultants, contractors, end-users and, 15 years ago, we realised that we needed to start looking at turnkey projects ourselves.” Today, designing and manufacturing full plant rooms is a large and growing part of the business.
AWARDS AND HYDROGEN
The King’s Award announcement in 2025 brought wider public attention to what the industry had been watching for some time. Dunphy was named among the North West firms recognised in a cohort that spanned a broad range of innovative British businesses, and the recognition validated a product development process that had been running quietly — and expensively — in parallel with the company’s core commercial activity.
The hydrogen burner is the result of that process. Designed to fire simultaneously on natural gas and hydrogen, it allows industrial operators to blend fuels as hydrogen availability increases, rather than requiring a wholesale switch in one step. Trials at industrial manufacturing sites gave the product real-world validation in demanding high-volume environments.
The product’s emissions performance has been a particular focus. NOx emissions are the key regulatory metric for any combustion technology, and the standards are tightening. “The NOx level for hydrogen was initially set at 200mg and we achieved that without mitigation,” Kuligowski notes. In November 2025 that threshold was reduced to 137mg, and the team is now focused on meeting the new level without flue gas recirculation techniques. Research across the combustion sector suggests that hydrogen combustion, while producing no carbon dioxide, generates higher flame temperatures and consequently elevated NOx levels compared with natural gas — making this precisely the kind of technical challenge where Dunphy’s in-house research capability, developed over fifteen years in its own laboratory, is most relevant.
The Institute of Gas Engineers and Managers (IGEM) has also recognised the company’s innovation. Dunphy and Bosch jointly won the IGEM Product of the Year award for a combination burner and boiler developed at Dunphy’s factory — adding a second independent validation from within the gas industry to the King’s Award from the Crown.
The result of this partnership and its success is the enhancement of longstanding European export ambition. “We are hoping that in the next 12 months, depending on how the German government sees Net Zero, we can start to sell those hydrogen burners into Europe,” confirms Kuligowski.
The supply chain that supports all of this reflects the same quality-first philosophy that runs through the manufacturing operation. British steel is bought wherever possible. Local platers and painters, local copper piping and aluminium castings are all utilised, and a longstanding relationship with Lamtec for burner control systems is highlighted as invaluable in the production process. Gas valves are manufactured inhouse, hydrogen-ready valves come from Germany, and larger fans are outsourced where the scale exceeds inhouse capacity. A recently secured contract for a UK power station has underscored the scrutiny this chain must withstand. “Within the contract, we have to submit details of our entire supply chain. If there is any doubt about quality or location or even the smallest element of the supply chain, then the whole process stops,” explains Kuligowski. It is precisely the kind of requirement that rewards the investment in long-term, trusted partnerships.
BURNING FOR THE FUTURE
Despite internal successes, the trading environment over the past two years has been testing with a slowdown through 2025 against a very positive 2024. Government uncertainty around energy policy created a period of hesitation across various industry sectors, with customers slow to commit to purchasing decisions while the direction of fossil fuel regulation remained unclear. “There were suggestions of stopping burning all fossil fuels but that simply cannot happen overnight,” Kuligowski says. “Fossil fuels are required, and that is now realised.”
The disruption to global energy supply chains — the closure of the Strait of Hormuz among the most acute examples — has concentrated minds on the practical realities of energy transition, and reinforced the case for a technology like Dunphy’s simultaneous-firing system, which works with the infrastructure and fuels that industry currently has while opening a pathway to lower emissions.
“Since the beginning of this year, we have had our best order period ever and we expect to increase revenue by around 15% by the end of this financial year,” Kuligowski details. The release of previously stalled decisions is flowing through, and the hydrogen burner portfolio provides a forward case that is growing stronger as the regulatory environment clarifies.
The people behind the recent success, and the ambition for the future, are the same people who built the business in the first place. 30% of Dunphy’s workforce has been with the company for more than twenty years. A colleague who recently marked 51 years of service is not an anomaly — it is a reflection of a culture that Kuligowski describes with pride.
“People are very important to us and we do commit to our people as much as we possibly can to foster a positive and creative environment.” In an industry where skills retention is an increasing challenge, that continuity carries direct commercial value: the institutional knowledge held by a team that has been manufacturing complex combustion systems together for decades cannot be replicated quickly.
Industrial combustion is not always a glamorous sector, and hydrogen is not a simple fuel. Converting industrial heat processes — foundries, food manufacturers, paper mills, chemical plants — from fossil fuels to lower-carbon alternatives requires engineering solutions that work reliably at scale, in demanding environments, from suppliers with the depth of experience to stand behind them. Dunphy Combustion, with its King’s Award, its IGEM recognition, its five years of hydrogen development, and its 60-year manufacturing foundation, is precisely the kind of company the energy transition needs in its supply chain; home to an innovative flame, first sparked in 1964, burning cleaner than ever.