october2022 - 58

GUE ST EDITORIA L
cost reduction and proper fleet maintenance.
Something highly desirable to equipment
owners in today's market is saving money on
service. Most of the maintenance that needs to be
done can be serviced straight from your truckyard
to avoid high maintenance costs. Check
in with an external partner that can help you
monitor your engine's diesel fuel through digital
maintenance monitoring systems for maximum
operating performance and efficiency.
Photo: 177798955 | Fototocam | Dreamstime and Senzit
Filter monitoring for
increased uptime
By monitoring filter data, fleets can
avoid engine damage and downtime.
Inflation and continued supply chain strains
are driving up costs, particularly on replaceable
engine parts. Proper engine maintenance will
ensure parts last longer and the system runs at
peak performance. This is the job air and fuel
filters were made for, so a smart strategy is to
make sure these also operate at an optimal level.
One option is to have technicians perform
more frequent engine checks, but with the
shortage of qualified repair technicians, this
could leave other tasks undone. The less
labor-intensive solution is to deploy a continuous
filtration monitoring solution. Recent
advances in sensor technology, along with
the wider use of telematics and data analytics,
are making this possible and helping prevent
downtime caused by poor filtration.
These solutions continuously look for a dip in
performance and alert fleets. This allows fleets
to proactively schedule a filter change that, if
left unchecked, could put undue stress on the
engine. Even if this doesn't lead to a costly
roadside event or unscheduled maintenance,
the truck will lose fuel efficiency and increase
the fleet's fuel expense.
Continuously monitoring your filtration helps
to not only minimize costly, unwanted downtime,
but also unchains your operations from a
time-based schedule to a condition-based one,
often reducing the number of filters you need to
purchase and stock each year. The savings can
really add up across an entire fleet.
With this said, let's focus on the two different
types of filtration monitoring for your over-theroad
vehicles: air and fuel.
Particulate air filters
Diesel soot, dust, dirt, and pollen are all filtered
out of a vehicle's cabin through its particulate
filters. With these filters capturing the largest
pollutants, and because of the importance of
air filters to the health and safety of both the
operator and the truck, they will need to be
cleaned or replaced in a routine manner.
Unfortunately, many truck operators don't
check their dirty air filters and end up having
downtime problems as consequence. Whether
you are an operator or a fleet manager, become
educated on this matter and properly maintain
your vehicles for health, safety, and
equipment performance.
An important area to start this education
is the diesel particulate filter (DPF), which
captures and stores particulates in its cylindrical-honeycomb
structure. Those captured
particulates must be occasionally burned off
to regenerate the filter. If your DPF were to fail
due to poor servicing or maintenance, particulates
could get to your vehicle's core system
and cause damage over time, resulting in
unplanned downtime or even engine failure.
Replacing an air filter can be expensive-
but replacing an engine system is even more
expensive. You are protecting hundreds of
thousands of dollars of equipment by investing
in suitable filters and filtration monitoring.
By Chaz Vollmer
PRODUCT OWNER, SENZIT
Chaz Vollmer is an expert in data-driven technologies with
over a decade of experience in product management and
digital application design. As Product Owner at Senzit, he
leads the user experience program and predictive analytics
innovation team, focused on reducing heavy-duty
equipment downtime.
Fuel filtration
If you aren't replacing the diesel filter consistently,
it can force the engine to use more fuel
to get power and acceleration, which can wear
the engine down. Nowadays, creating filter
replacement intervals based on data instead
of a blanket number of miles can be vital to
58 Fleet Maintenance | October 2022
The solution: predictive monitoring
The greatest way to monitor your diesel engines
is through predictive maintenance monitoring
tools that give you a complete overview of your
equipment with engine analytics and location
services. For a better understanding of what
you may be able to benefit from by using these
external services, you may want to research
the digital maintenance services used by many
top companies.
In trucking and transportation, equipment
reliability is essential for profit maximization
and deadline completion. With this proactive
approach, you'll worry less about diesel soot
and improve uptime with predictive maintenance
tools to increase how many miles your
equipment travels per quarter. These condition-based
monitoring tools allow you to spend
more time on what matters most-moving
commercially, not fixing problematic engines.
Many top equipment monitoring solutions
provide these features to help your company
with maintenance:
* Predictive engine and filter monitoring:
Obtaining AI-powered actionable insights
so you can predict maintenance and avoid
emergency repairs instead of operating by a
predetermined schedule is cost-effective and
increases a business' return on investment.
* Maintenance logging and reporting: Many
top solutions include the ability to log and
report your maintenance for leadership, as
well as communicate with local maintenance
businesses for easy-to-obtain services.
* Geolocation: With the ability to monitor both
active and historical fleet visibility straight
from phone or computer applications, location
servicing has never been easier. Geolocation is
perfect for theft prevention and keeping your
aggregate equipment on-site.
* Driver workflows: Trucking operators can
minimize guesswork and reduce paper-andpen
data entry with guided workflows and
optimized productivity.
With both air and fuel filtration monitoring
clearly showing as vital components to your
average over-the-road fleet equipment, you will
need to engage in this practice to keep up with
your competitors.
In closing, just remember the biggest benefit
of filtration monitoring is reducing unplanned
and unwanted downtime. Keeping your vehicles
on track to destinations without critical
problems is key to being a fleet manager. Help
yourself with predictive engine analytics by
investing in digital maintenance tools that
make your and your operators' lives easier.
october2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of october2022
