Essential Fluid Cleanliness for Haul Truck Rear Wheels
Haul trucks are an integral piece of equipment to any mining operation. For haul trucks with electrically driven rear wheels, protecting the rear wheel gear box is essential to keep them running and achieve lower total cost of ownership.
Each rear wheel assembly on a haul truck represents cost of $250,000 USD or a replacement cost of $600,000 USD. According to General Electric*, the estimated expected life of a rear wheel motor is 24,000 hours. In order to achieve or surpass that life, fluid cleanliness is essential. Fluid that does not meet the specification for contamination, water, and wear metals like iron must be drained and replaced.
A Kidney Loop Cart with Donaldson Blue® DBB8665 filters provide 7-micron filtration efficiency @ Beta 2000 on the gear oil used in rear wheel systems. This system cleans the fluid and allows it to meet or exceed OE standards, allowing an average of 4x longer drain intervals between fluid replacement compared to systems without kidney loop filtration.** This equates to a reduction of five ISO contamination codes, resulting in a significant reduction of wear metal.
Problem
After 500 hours on new fluid, analysis showed ISO code increases to 25/23/18 with iron concentration at 250 parts per million or more.
Solution
Using a Kidney Loop Cart with Donaldson Blue DBB8665 filters, ISO codes between 18/16/13 to 20/18/14 can be achieved, resulted in an average of 4x longer drain intervals.**
Two auxiliary Rear Wheel Kidney Loop carts ran on individual wheel motors while other preventative maintenance services were being completed; typically taking less than 3 hours to complete. DBB8865 Donaldson Blue Lubricant Filter has multilayered synthetic media which is optimized for efficiency, capacity, and pressure drop.
Result
Lower Cost of Ownership: Increasing the cleanliness of the fluid through filtration allowed gear lube drain intervals to be extended. The reduction in contamination (dirt and iron) resulted in up to 1.7x (or 40,000 hours) the life extension of the component based on Noria Corporation’s Life Extension Table.
Note: It is important to continue to perform fluid inspection every 500 hours or as directed by the OE manufacturer’s recommendations.
Each solution is customized to meet your needs. Contact Donaldson for assistance.
