Industry: Engine Manufacturer
The Situation: The high pressures and extremely tight tolerances of today’s high-pressure common rail (HPCR) fuel injection systems mean that any contaminants in fuel can lead to downtime and expensive repairs. If water enters the fuel – typically from storage tanks and condensation – it can cause corrosion, reduce fuel lubricity, erode injector nozzles and damage system components.
For one of our engine manufacturer customers, fuel injector failures caused by water contamination were creating high warranty costs and damaging their reputation. The customer approached Donaldson to find the root cause of the issue, provide a solution and help rebuild their relationship with OEM customers.
The Challenge: Our customer was experiencing consistent fuel injector failure due to poor fuel and water separation in their fuel systems. To find a solution, we needed to understand the behavior of the fuel filtration system under real-life, severe, and dynamic loads. The goal was to find and fix the problem, reduce our customer’s high warranty costs and restore their brand reputation.
Our Solution: Donaldson SELECT™ Fuel
With our innovative Dynamic Force fuel bench testing, Donaldson is uniquely positioned to simulate real-world conditions and expose current performance failures in fuel injection systems, and that testing served us well in this case. We determined that the first part of the solution was our proprietary, top-performing fuel and water separation media technology – which, combined with our portfolio of filter components, provides cleaner fuel in real-world conditions. We also developed a custom filter design to protect the OEM from future warranty claims due to the usage of non-genuine parts that can lead to fuel injection failures. Finally, we created marketing material to help the customer promote the value of the fuel and water separation technology offered by Donaldson.
— Engine Manufacturer Engineering Team
The Outcome: Using our fuel and water separation innovations, we delivered a fuel filter that exceeded our customer’s requirements. Our customer recaptured their lost market share against lower performance, non-genuine competitors and sold more than 25,000 replacement filters in one year. The project was such a success that the OEM partnered with Donaldson to introduce similar technology across their product offerings.
By leveraging our knowledge of real-world conditions and industry-leading testing capabilities, we were able to quickly run a root-cause analysis and determine the best solution for our customer.
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