Not sure people knew this or not but I was going thru some of my downloaded articles and figured this was good info to pass along.
In one statement : Your water fuel separator may not be removing anywhere near the water it is suppose to be with water going straight to your injectors.
Short summary: When we were forced by tree huggers, to protect there DPF and cats rather than change them, to go to first LSD and now to ULSD we first took a a $0.30 per gallon hit. Going from the least costly fuel to only barely cheaper than the most expensive hp gasoline. Next was loss of lubricity which killed our pumps injectors etc.. So now we need fuel additives to keep our parts from failing yet another added cost. Most all fuel companies looking to add some bio to meet the lubricity levels 2%.
Better explanation:
Now it seems there is yet another very serious pitfall to all this cause by needing no sulphur. Water in the diesel fuel mixing well. You say but wait I have a water fuel separator. You may even have a totally separate dedicated one. You may change and drain them without fail. So you think you have got it covered. Your filter saying it pulls almost all the water out. Well you can not drain the water if its not there to drain. It will not be there to drain if it ends up passing right thru the filter. Apparently that is exactly what is happening. Apparently in the rush to remove sulphur to protect those cat and DPF they ended up doing far more. The additives they must use to restore lubricity or the bio diesel them now mix in for the same reason cause the water to actually be able to mix with the fuel so it can now pass right thru the filtering media meant to stop it. Almost all the water fuel sep rely on the fact that water likes to be with water and diesel likes to be with diesel. The do not like the mix. They have different specific gravities. AS we all have seen water falls oil rises to the top. If you have a water droplet it attracts other water droplets. When it gets big enough it falls to the bottom.
Add in these new surfactants to fix what they f'd-up to bow to the tree huggers only created yet another and just as if not more costly f-up. All the water separators work based on fuel and water do not like to mix period. All we do is pull off on of the layers so to speak. The degree to which they repel each other is called interfacial tension (IFT). They are assigned value in number of dynes/cm . The higher the number dynes/cm to more they repel or want to be separate from each other or the lower the "surfactancy" is ) a very good thing). The lower the number of dynes/cm the more they will mix which increases its surfactancy which means they mix better and filters will be increasingly less effective.
In the rush to eliminate the evil sulphur contained in the fuel they never took the time to update the testing standards etc for the fuel. In this case being water fuel sep performance standard. See the normal good old diesel our engines love, made great power from, and don't f-up our systems while keeping our injectors quiet has a Interfacial Tension (IFT) of about 25-30 dynes/cm. Actually that was the LSD. Before that it was even higher as less additives were needed. But the current filtering system were tested and rated based on those levels so it was OK. Now with ULSD IFT range 9-23 dynes/cm. If its mixed with BIO to fix the lubricity its 8-15 dynes/cm Range is larger and much lower. It means far more water is being able to mix with the diesel (emulsification) Even when it's not the droplet sizes are now far smaller and attraction is far less.
Best check your filters and see if they have any performance rating for Bio diesel. Whats worse is, as it only takes a knee jerk reaction to get them to screw up our fuel, to get all the various testing and perf standards/procedures updated and changed takes forever. These new fuels have been know for a generation and out nor for years yet still to this day the testing standards are all over the place. Read the links carefully and take note of the testing to look at for the ratings claimed. In some test standards they can have 7 times higher water and still rate fine.
There is one thing that I found very important as many of us are using hi volume / high flow / high pressure fuel systems: With the changes made to the fuel and with bio, as the flow increased over the water sep media the performance decreased. The larger you could spread the flow out over the media the better the performance. I think this points directly to using the largest size water fuel separator filters as possible. The higher the pleat count or surface area the better. Then the largest OAL size.
South West Research Institute 8th international Filtration Conference: Understanding emulsified water filtration from diesel fuels
Fuel filtration: Protecting the diesel engine 07 May 2009''
There is tons of data and papers on this subject. A google search string of "ULSD Interfacial Tension" will get you more than ever wanted.
In one statement : Your water fuel separator may not be removing anywhere near the water it is suppose to be with water going straight to your injectors.
Short summary: When we were forced by tree huggers, to protect there DPF and cats rather than change them, to go to first LSD and now to ULSD we first took a a $0.30 per gallon hit. Going from the least costly fuel to only barely cheaper than the most expensive hp gasoline. Next was loss of lubricity which killed our pumps injectors etc.. So now we need fuel additives to keep our parts from failing yet another added cost. Most all fuel companies looking to add some bio to meet the lubricity levels 2%.
Better explanation:
Now it seems there is yet another very serious pitfall to all this cause by needing no sulphur. Water in the diesel fuel mixing well. You say but wait I have a water fuel separator. You may even have a totally separate dedicated one. You may change and drain them without fail. So you think you have got it covered. Your filter saying it pulls almost all the water out. Well you can not drain the water if its not there to drain. It will not be there to drain if it ends up passing right thru the filter. Apparently that is exactly what is happening. Apparently in the rush to remove sulphur to protect those cat and DPF they ended up doing far more. The additives they must use to restore lubricity or the bio diesel them now mix in for the same reason cause the water to actually be able to mix with the fuel so it can now pass right thru the filtering media meant to stop it. Almost all the water fuel sep rely on the fact that water likes to be with water and diesel likes to be with diesel. The do not like the mix. They have different specific gravities. AS we all have seen water falls oil rises to the top. If you have a water droplet it attracts other water droplets. When it gets big enough it falls to the bottom.
Add in these new surfactants to fix what they f'd-up to bow to the tree huggers only created yet another and just as if not more costly f-up. All the water separators work based on fuel and water do not like to mix period. All we do is pull off on of the layers so to speak. The degree to which they repel each other is called interfacial tension (IFT). They are assigned value in number of dynes/cm . The higher the number dynes/cm to more they repel or want to be separate from each other or the lower the "surfactancy" is ) a very good thing). The lower the number of dynes/cm the more they will mix which increases its surfactancy which means they mix better and filters will be increasingly less effective.
In the rush to eliminate the evil sulphur contained in the fuel they never took the time to update the testing standards etc for the fuel. In this case being water fuel sep performance standard. See the normal good old diesel our engines love, made great power from, and don't f-up our systems while keeping our injectors quiet has a Interfacial Tension (IFT) of about 25-30 dynes/cm. Actually that was the LSD. Before that it was even higher as less additives were needed. But the current filtering system were tested and rated based on those levels so it was OK. Now with ULSD IFT range 9-23 dynes/cm. If its mixed with BIO to fix the lubricity its 8-15 dynes/cm Range is larger and much lower. It means far more water is being able to mix with the diesel (emulsification) Even when it's not the droplet sizes are now far smaller and attraction is far less.
Best check your filters and see if they have any performance rating for Bio diesel. Whats worse is, as it only takes a knee jerk reaction to get them to screw up our fuel, to get all the various testing and perf standards/procedures updated and changed takes forever. These new fuels have been know for a generation and out nor for years yet still to this day the testing standards are all over the place. Read the links carefully and take note of the testing to look at for the ratings claimed. In some test standards they can have 7 times higher water and still rate fine.
There is one thing that I found very important as many of us are using hi volume / high flow / high pressure fuel systems: With the changes made to the fuel and with bio, as the flow increased over the water sep media the performance decreased. The larger you could spread the flow out over the media the better the performance. I think this points directly to using the largest size water fuel separator filters as possible. The higher the pleat count or surface area the better. Then the largest OAL size.
South West Research Institute 8th international Filtration Conference: Understanding emulsified water filtration from diesel fuels
Fuel filtration: Protecting the diesel engine 07 May 2009''
There is tons of data and papers on this subject. A google search string of "ULSD Interfacial Tension" will get you more than ever wanted.