Abstract The salient fundamental factors that influence the design of low NO x burners and of NO x abatement schemes are reviewed. They have been examined through laboratory combustor studies, which simulate some of the salient features of practical systems, while still preserving flexibility and the ability to extract mechanisms. These studies have shown that coal ignition properties and flame attachment to the burner have great influence on coal nitrogen convention to NO x in axial turbulent diffusion flames. They have also shown that distributed air addition is more effective at reducing NO x formation than simple air staging, and these results conform to field data from full scale applications Short time scale phenomena in the ignition zone involve heterogeneous and micro-scale diffusion phenomena, and the total volatile nitrogen released is only partially converted to NO x even in the presence of excess quantities of oxygen. Micro-mixing also complicates predictions of short time scale phenomena duri...