How can the efficiency of fuel oil purifiers be increased?
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Good question.
With the increased Catfines content in fuel, purifiers have to be very efficient (some times more than 80%) for the safe consumption of fuel.
Your best bet is Crew to simply follow maker’s maintenance routines with an emphasis given to cleaning of the disc stack and bowl.
So assuming proper maintenance and cleaning of purifiers, the next step is to try operating them at the lowest possible flow rate.
A slight increase in temperature can help too.
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The cat fine content limit set by engine makers is 15 mg/kg whereas the ISO 8217 may accept bunkers with cat fines content up to 60 mg/kg.
ISO is tolerant with respect to the cat fines content, but the engines are not.
Therefore, in order to avoid fast and catastrophic damages in the cylinder unit components, the fuel oil purifiers must be properly maintained at all times with genuine spares.
As far as their efficiency is concerned, @Spyros.P is correct, the key points are:
- reduced flowrate (see the graph below)
- increased inlet temperature (98-99 degrees Celsius)
I would also add:
- Purifiers efficiency test (analysis of before and after purifier samples) at least once per year.
- Correct setting of flushing / washing cycles depending on sludge producing characteristics of each fuel.
Please check the below interesting graph. We can see that at 10% of the purifier rated capacity, its efficiency increases by 300%.
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Agree with the above comments from @Paraschos.Liadis.
Although it does not help directly the purifiers efficiency, but it improves the quality of fuel fed into Main Engine/Diesel Generators, I would also add frequent draining (perhaps every two or four hours) of service/settling tanks.
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Good point @AndreasTravlos .
Draining the tanks is one of those things that everyone does differently. Would be interesting to see some data on whether draining every 2 hrs rather than twice a day has any measurable effect on cat fine concentration at injection.
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