Recent Shenanigans

Well, other then the suspension (below) not a great deal has changed. Same house, same cars, same dog, same job. Of course, all of which I have looked at upgrading. House needs more garage, been thinking a cheap ass car for autoxing (place up the street has a $2900 mid 80's 6 series [unfortunately an automatic], and a $1900 VW Scirocco 16V, both of which could be purchased a lot cheaper because this is that kind of dealership), Winston could go for a buddy (I'm thinking beagle or another basset) to hang out with during the day, and I want to move to a new position in the company, but my boss won't let me until June. Oh, and now that I start thinking about it. . .

Lets talk about crappy projects. There are several types of crappy projects, but I often get stuck with two specific types: the kind that no one cares about, and the kind that everyone cares about, but you cant give a good answer to.

Most recently, I have been stuck with a project no one would take claim to for over a year now, and my boss said "My gut feeling is to give it to Justin (he later introduced me as 'Jacob' in a different meeting and introduced another person under him as the wrong name as well, in fact, once he wrote 'Josh' on my performance review, but I digress...)"

The project is a DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) cleaning machine. DPF's are the new exhaust component that filter diesel particulate (hence the name) until the filter becomes clogged, in which case the exhaust temperatures are elevated, either from towing a large load or hard acceleration. Now, some vehicles wont experience these situations, like delivery truck for example, and will become clogged and not clean themselves, and will need to be removed and manually cleaned. Also, despite regular burn off cycles, the filter will eventually need to be cleaned anyway. I forgot to mention, on Class 8 trucks, these filters cost about $3,000 each, so cleaning is much preferable to replacement.

So, the machine we are looking at is essentially a big, sophisticated potato cannon. The technician takes the DPF off of the exhaust, puts it in the machine, which then blows bursts of air opposite of the direction of exhaust flow to clean it out. The air then goes through some filters and a final HEPA filter.

The biggest problem with this project is that there is no good way of measuring what a clean filter is. Weight doesn't do a good job, as the filters vary a great deal between clean filter and clean filter, the weight removed varies based on whether it was loaded with soot or ash, and pressure differential doesn't do much either, as the filters also vary a great deal in this matter.

The best thing that we have come up with to manually test the filter for cleanliness is a drop-rod test, which is dropping a welding rod into the cells in a certain pattern to check for soot and ash build-up. The issue we have with this is the grey area, as its more based on feel than fact, and would be hard to instruct technicians across the country on how to do it.

So far, the only thing that I have come up with is Mass Air Flow measured after the filter. Since the pulse is done at a controlled pressure and volume, I believe you can accurately measure the a MAF after the filter in order to determine the difference between a clogged and clean filter.

So, I have until Q3 of 07 to figure this out, get our suppliers to implement this, test it at multiple field sites, and release it. While the engines are out and running on these filters, we don't predict anyone will need their filter cleaned until the problem. Which, by the way, is another issue. Our field test engines cant clog these filters, which is good for the engine guys, but bad for me, as I don't get very many filters to test on.

If you have any advise or engineering input, fill me in. I'll make it worth your while.