From Fleet Owner Magazine

Lex Tdi

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2016
Location
Lexington ky
TDI
2013 Passat
We get this trade magazine for our truck fleet and laughed out loud when i saw UPS had a DPF failure rate of 51% (at 5 grand each!), sheesh....

http://fleetowner.com/maintenance/maintenance-bay-wet-wash-delivered

Fleet Manager: Mark Collins
Company: United Parcel Service
Operation: Caring for 280,631 pieces of equipment in the U.S., including 80,231 package-car delivery units and vans, plus 20,789 Class 8 units and yard tractors

PROBLEM:

Cleaning diesel particulate filters (DPFs) is a critical maintenance task for any truck fleet. Those devices are designed to capture the soot emanating from diesel engine exhaust that must be removed to keep the filter from clogging.

The process of burning that accumulated soot within the filter is called regeneration, which is where the temperature within the filter is raised to reduce that soot into ash.

Now, that ash eventually must be removed from the DPF, leaving it ready for reuse—a process that needs to be done carefully. DPFs typically cost $5,000 per unit and are made with ceramic substrates, which can fracture if handled too roughly, requiring the DPF to be replaced.

Usually, DPF cleaning requires heating the filter and then using compressed air combined with a vacuum system to push the ash out of the unit and into a sealed container, a process Mark Collins, UPS fleet manager, called the “bake and blast” method.

Yet Collins said Big Brown found that this bake and blast method created problems. In October 2016, UPS found itself suffering a DPF “fallout rate” of 51%, meaning over half of the fleet’s DPFs were being scrapped due to cracked substrates (59%), damaged housings (15%), substrates (1%), contamination (75%), and flow issues (8%) relating to restricted air flow through the device—leading to reduced fuel economy. What to do?

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SOLUTION:

To address this issue, UPS decided to add what’s called a “wet wash” system for cleaning its DPFs, a process that helped remove softened ash from its devices more gently, preventing damage to both the DPF’s housing and substrate, while more thoroughly cleaning out individual cells within the substrate to improve air flow when reinstalled.

When UPS started testing its wet-wash DPF cleaning system in the fourth quarter of last year, Collins said, it found the process removed an extra half-pound of ash from the devices compared to the bake and blast method alone.

By January of this year, Collins noted that Big Brown had cut that DPF fallout rate from 51% down to 37% by adding the wet-wash process to its DPF cleaning protocol. UPS also witnessed a 2% to 25% improvement in the final stage cleanliness of its DPFs by moving to a bake-air-blast wet wash cleaning process.

“We’re still evaluating this new method,” Collins added. “We’ve also started using a scrapping process for the bad ones [DPFs] we still need to take out of service, collecting the precious metals within the [scrapped] DPFs, which has helped level out our costs.”
 

rustycat

Veteran Member
Joined
Dec 27, 2012
Location
seattle
TDI
2015 passat sel
I think the environment UPS trucks face has got to be one of the hardest there is for diesels. Short runs, quick startups, lots of idling... I would think their trucks would be perfect for hybrid electric and not diesel.
 

Lex Tdi

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2016
Location
Lexington ky
TDI
2013 Passat
The spent the money here in KY to build their own natural gas fueling station at their distribution station... Required its own mini electrical station to run the pumps.
 

Skimax

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2001
Location
White mts, NH
TDI
97 B4 variant(retired at 330K), 2000 B5 1.8T passat retired, 2013 SE (buyback5/17) 2015 SEL, 2015 E-Golf SEL sold March 2019, 2018 Volt LT and a 2007 PRHT MX5 for fun
Before I retired I was driving a 2014 Mack tractor for UPS. I had driven various tractors over the years there and can truthfully say the newest ones had the most issues. I remember several tractors in the feeder (TT) shop to replace the DPFs that had failed. Glad I'm past that point in life.
 

Matt-98AHU

Loose Nut Behind the Wheel Vendor
Joined
Apr 23, 2006
Location
Gresham, OR
TDI
2001 Golf TDI, 2005 Passat wagon, 2004 Touareg V10.
I think the environment UPS trucks face has got to be one of the hardest there is for diesels. Short runs, quick startups, lots of idling... I would think their trucks would be perfect for hybrid electric and not diesel.
Know what's kind of funny? I toured the EPA's Ann Arbor, Michigan facilities sometime around 2009-10. I was there mostly because they had a test mule meant to simulate a hydraulic hybrid concept in a vehicle most people could relate to, in this case a Ford Expedition.

The reason myself and a couple friends got called in there because a certain person over at IDParts recommended us... The internal combustion engine that was acting as their hydraulic pump was an ALH.

Funnier still, before all that went down, I did a wheel alignment on the same vehicle at the tire shop I worked at in Ann Arbor at the time. I got to drive the beast. Very odd experience.

Anyway, while we were walking through the EPA's facilities, which has countless dyno rooms, I noticed that they at the time had a large amount of testing going on that involved these hydraulic hybrids, most of them were prototype UPS trucks...

FWIW, UPS does use some other interesting alternative fuel options in their fleet.

Though, if their Expedition test mule was any indication, their biggest problem was keeping hydraulic fluid in the system. The thing had diapers underneath both axles to catch leaking fluid. lol
 

VeeDubTDI

Wanderluster, Traveler, TDIClub Enthusiast
Joined
Jul 2, 2000
Location
Springfield, VA
TDI
‘18 Tesla Model 3D+, ‘14 Cadillac ELR, ‘13 Fiat 500e
I think the environment UPS trucks face has got to be one of the hardest there is for diesels. Short runs, quick startups, lots of idling... I would think their trucks would be perfect for hybrid electric and not diesel.
I think most of UPS's diesel+DPF fleet right now is big rigs, not local delivery trucks. Occasionally I'll see some diesel UPS delivery trucks, but most of those still have Cummins 4BTs or 6.0 PowerStrokes - both non-DPF.
 

oilhammer

Certified Volkswagen Nut & Vendor
Joined
Dec 11, 2001
Location
outside St Louis, MO
TDI
There are just too many to list....
UPS probably wishes they'd have kept more of their older OTR trucks on the road. They used to do this, but for whatever reason they turn them over much more now.

There were old 292 cid I6 4sp manual step vans running around with over 1 million miles on them, but now we just see newish 8.1L V8/slushbox trucks that are rarely over a few years old.
 

Lex Tdi

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2016
Location
Lexington ky
TDI
2013 Passat
Banging my head against a wall, the emissions dpf malfunctioned on one of our 2014 kenworth... kicks it to "limp" mode where 10mph is top speed, while he was on a 70 mph parkway. I'd like to think the safety of a human getting home outweighs whatever smog might go into the air for a day, apparently that view isnt held by our government.
 

oilhammer

Certified Volkswagen Nut & Vendor
Joined
Dec 11, 2001
Location
outside St Louis, MO
TDI
There are just too many to list....
My friend from school who works for Metro, or local mass transit authority, laughs all the time about when the dual fuel "clean" buses broke down and had to be rescued by a older diesel support vehicle (usually a 1990s era F350) or, worse, towed back to the shop by an even older recovery vehicle (some of these are from the 1970s) AND necessitate putting one of the older standby diesel buses back in service on the route to keep people moving.

They had pretty much a 100% failure rate of some sort early on, so bad they pulled the plug on those particular models. We were a trial city (well, STL was, I do not actually live there) and the other handful of cities that were trials for them had similar results.
 
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