News & Articles
Autonomous Fluid Intelligence™ - The Future of Diesel Engine Reliability
Article by Bill Gillette (LogiLube) and Sanya Mathura (Strategic Reliability Solutions)
As diesel engines evolve, so do the regulations and operational demands that surround them. With modern heavy-duty diesel engines, these are responsible for larger workloads, with tighter emission tolerances, higher injection pressures, advanced combustion strategies and increased demand duty cycles. As these diesel engines evolve, traditional reactive maintenance approaches are no longer as effective and in many cases have become obsolete.
The future of diesel engine reliability may depend on Autonomous Fluid Intelligence™, systems capable of continuously monitoring lubricant and fuel condition, identifying emerging anomalies, predicting remaining useful life, and autonomously responding before catastrophic failures occur. SmartOil® developed an advanced G3 Edge-AI Brain™ that continuously monitors the condition of the engine oil detecting anomalies in advance of a potential catastrophic engine failure. As such, the AI-based system can predict the remaining-useful-life (RUL) of the oil and trigger autonomous Exception Samples™ (human-free, forensic-grade, ASTM-ready physical oil samples) for detailed lab analysis and corroboration of sensor measurements.
Lab-verified and data-driven corrective action and be taken by maintenance staff before imminent engine damage occurs.
By utilizing a single integrated platform, the SmartOil® G3 Edge-AI Brain™ system combines:
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Real time fluid condition monitoring and trending
- Engine oil viscosity (cSt)
- Dielectric constant (water-in-oil contamination, TBN shift)
- Coolant chemistry
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Fuel contamination analytics
- Fuel injector health proxy
- Indication of fuel dilution
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Autonomous forensic-grade, ASTM-ready fluid sampling
- Exception Samples™
- Autonomous fluid samples (per user-defined programmed cadence),
elimination-of-live-work (ELW) regulation compliant
- Manual fluid samples
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GPS/LTE fleet telemetry
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Edge-AI anomaly detection
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LoLM/LLM predictive analytics
By continuously learning from fluid behavior, operating environments, thermal conditions, GPS location-aware, and equipment loading profiles, SmartOil enables earlier detection of injector failures, fuel dilution, coolant ingress, and abnormal combustion conditions before they escalate into major downtime events.
Exception sampling is the real game changer as the SmartOil® G3 Edge-AI Brain™ can determine if there are slight changes in the health of the fluid and instruct the system to take a sample at that exact point of the operation. The reason this helps is that it can also be correlated to a particular environmental condition for that application and this learning can be applied across the fleet. As such, if we realize that excessive idling of 75% leads to an increase in fuel dilution in the oil system, then other units would need to decrease their idling times to below 75%. Since these samples are taken in real time, it allows the operators to optimize their maintenance plans to incorporate changes.
When applied to underground mining, this is where a lot of financial and safety benefits are brought to the forefront. For instance, with a failing fuel injector, this can lead to incomplete combustion which increases the amount of CO and NOx being produced. With the increase in the presence of these gases, the ventilation alarms will trip, and the mine will have to be evacuated until these are cleared up. This can stop production and even delay the expected deadlines of the projects. It can also cause regulatory fines to be paid depending on the exposure of the gas. As such, implementing the SmartOil® G3 Edge-AI Brain™ can help to reduce some of these risks.
The future of predictive maintenance is no longer periodic inspection alone.
The future is intelligent autonomous systems capable of understanding the fluid itself.
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