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Reliability, maintenance take center court
Last month in this space we looked at the increasingly important role of engine oils in meeting diesel-engine emissions standards in the year 2002, presenting views offered at the summer meeting of The Maintenance Council of ATA in Indian Wells, Calif., by an engine builder, Mack Trucks, and an oil-additive-package formulator, Lubrizol.
Attendees at that meeting also heard Mark Hassel, national account manager at Fleetguard/Nelson and Herschel Brown, vp-maintenance at Nashville-based Proline Carriers, address other aspects of the role of the newer engine oils, mainly extended drain intervals.
Before 1999 many fleets were well on their way to establishing extended oil drain intervals (EDI), says Hassel, but now some fleets are worried that the need for exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) to meet 2002 emissions specs could increase soot levels in their engine oils and affect those drain intervals.
Real-world engine tests, Hassel says, show that roughly 90% or more of the contamination found in engines is organic - soot and sludge. Yet filter manufacturers, he notes, have long thought that filters were put on engines to take out inorganics such as dust, dirt, and wear metals.
Soot acts as a wear abrasive in an engine, he notes, while sludge, though not abrasive, plugs filters through adsorption on the filter media and on itself, and leads to early filter failure. So sludge removal must also be part of an EDI program.
In designing such a program for the future, Hassel recommends that a fleet consider the fleet's engine type (diesel, gasoline, or mixed?); duty cycle (truly representative across the fleet); maintenance practices (keyed to a periodic grease job or some other shop task?); choice of oils and filtration systems (key elements for EDI); testing and diagnostics (oil analysis for the life of the oil, but how about a gauge to check filter life?); and technical support of engine,...