Heavy Duty Trucking, September 2018

SEPTEMBER 2018 HDT 73 WWW TRUCKINGINFO COMmaintenance program based on whats going wrong in the field With the data I can incorporate a proactive fix or at least add certain inspection points into the PM he says Aftertreatment is still the four letter word of truck maintenance but I have to say we dont find it a big problem Because of the previous codes weve seen we have been able to build a pretty robust aftertreatment service program into our PM process We are constantly flushing out DPFs cleaning doser valves and pressure testing EGR coolers all at 30000 to 50000 mile service intervals I rarely get aftertreatment system codes anymore Sharps program pulls together the history and science of truck maintenance Cornelius used the codes to foretell of a problem and the historical data from previous failures to prevent reoccurrences To pull or not to pull Fleets can now use the benefits of analytics and historical data to decide whether they should pull a part before it fails in order to prevent an in service failure that might lead to unscheduled downtime Thermo Kings senior manager of digital analytics Scott Stark says the benefits of doing that proactive service can often be hard to quantify The cost of pre emptive replacement needs to be balanced with the benefits from reduction of in service failures he says For example what is the cost to your business of missing a delivery window for a new customer We do know that customers who participate in our preventative maintenance would fail so we could pull it in advance This is more about identifying problems on the fly and formulating correct responses to the problem The proliferation of sensors and the data they produce combined with our data science capability helps a fleet to know what is likely to fail well before it does says Keith Mader vice president transportation analytics Trimble Inc which brings together the talents of TMW and PeopleNet Fleets arent doing just preventive maintenance which is important for all the usual reasons now they have predictive capabilities They can determine the implications of the impending problem and take the appropriate steps while there is still time to plan Mader says its not usually a go no go proposition though that can be the case with critical failures but rather a probability situation The system sorts through a collection of fault codes and determines that when certain conditions are present a particular failure will result 75 80 of the time We are giving you enough information to imply the likelihood of an occurrence he says Determining the appropriate course of action may still require a little troubleshooting by the maintenance department Jarit Cornelius vice president of maintenance and compliance at Ethridge Tennessee based Sharp Transport has been studying the fault codes and probable failure messages and has developed a proactive and evolving preventive evolving truck technology and different applications and duty cycles For example Puff says we can predict when well need to clean or change a diesel particulate filter or predict certain injector failures by measuring how much fuel goes through an engine under what duty cycles On the other hand some failures are related to metallurgy or manufacturing or one off anomalies he says Its very difficult to see them coming at least the first of them because we dont have the historical record of previous failures Even the value of that historical data is debatable because some technology evolves so quickly Parts are constantly changing so its very difficult to say new components will perform the same way old components did Puff adds If historical data on component lifecycles is no longer a reliable predictor of impending failure then what we have left is scientific evidence he says which isnt hard to come by with todays technology Recent vintage trucks produce about four gigabytes of data in a single day Much of that is related to the condition and operation of the hundreds of onboard systems and components Capturing meaningful bits of information that contain clues about a potential problem is the new science of predictive maintenance or predictive analytics Its not predictive in the old sense where we wanted to know at what mileage a part Previous fault codes and historical data can inform and develop effective preventive maintenance programs that keep you ahead of the problems While aftertreatment system faults are amply represented in the data they are supplemented with additional background information that can help identify the source of the problem PHOTO RUSH TRUCK CENTERS PHOTO JIM PARK