Power Generation: Product Operation and Maintenance

[Braclite]

Hi Eric, what is the temp. on your jacket outlet? Some of our valves had excessive carbon build up and caused the valves not to seat properly and burn. The unit only runs at 1.5 Meg. at night, not sure if that is a contributing factor. What I do not understand is that this plant has a 3612 that runs on the same heads for over 20 thousand hours without failure and in Grand Cayman they also have the same heads and also no failures. We had two different dealer technicians adjust valve lash and bridge gaps and check injector timing to confirm that we had it correct. I agree with increasing the valve lash. We will try that. Thanks for the advice.

Martin

[egrant9]

Hi Martin, our jacket water outlet temp averages 85 to 90 degrees Celcius. 

We run our engines at MINIMUM 80% load, we try and have 90 to 95% load at all times. These engines like to have lots of load on them. In my opinion, 1.5 Meg is way too light of a load for an engine of this size. I believe that this is where your problem lies. 

Too much engine for the job. 

Eric

[woody]

egrant if you are still wanting additional help from Caterpillar please help me zero in on your location. If you don't want to broadcast it click on my user name and then on the link to send me a private message.

[egrant9]

Thanks Woody, but we have rectified the problem ourselves. 

We are now enjoying the fruits of our labours. 

egrant

[rneufeld]

Interesting subject

We(FINNING) see very few challenges with D3600 or G3600 cylinder heads, we have approx 200 engines in our territory and in the diesel EPG world, with Powerhouses we service, we have seen Mech Unit Inj go 22 000+ hours and cylinder heads go almost 27 000 hours, with no failures. Sample of those heads have went back to CAT for them to look at along with several of the high hour injectors (for convenience and speed we only use reman parts at this particular site). I have heard of challenges with failed valves on sites who rebuild their own heads or sites with high oil consumption (from light load or turbo challenges). I am personally working with CAT on discussions of extending service intervals, in my opinion; we are over servicing the product and could, with proper management, give the customers an even better operating cost/hour figure. Our next tests, if the customer chooses to participate will be extending the connecting rod bearing to overhaul interval. The engines that have experienced these extended service intervals(Injectors and Cylinder Heads) are 1PD's and are running at 4.275(advertised) 4.7 kW actual

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[wideglide058]

Good day Mr.. neufield. Did not mean to hijack your post about valves but you did touch on con rod bearing issues which is causing us a lot of headaches and lost jobs. Since cat has come out with the " hardened" con rod bearings we have had nothing but bad luck. Ourselves ( Blanchard ) and other cat dealers in our area has lost numerous crankshafts. After a couple of engineers came down to inspect our job ( I'm still one of your fans bob ) cat concluded using the cat rod bearing lube was not an acceptable procedure. It holds debris. I see the point but we've been using this product 10 years or more with no issues. I  installed another set of hardened bearing using lots of engine oil. Rotated engine numerous times and dropped caps again to find the hardened bearings falling apart.. Our solution was to install the soft bearing and send him on his way. After 8000 hours all is well. By the way this was on 3 engines with 2 getting crank replacements   your thoughts???

[jugi16]

Finning just did a Mid Life on a D3600 in Northen Canada and lost a crankshaft with the new hardened bearings. I'm not blaming Finning here, but it seems Cat has a problem with these bearings and aren't admitting to it. There is a bulletin out that you can check the date codes of the bearings to see if they fall within a certain date range. Supposedly there was a bad run of bearings. How many times have they changed the Rod bolts as well. Hopefully Cat mans up and addresses the problem.

[nallen]

Hi egrant,

I am newly arrived on a site in Northern Canada which has a power plant consisting of 3616 gensets. These have been running for 20000 hrs and they have a a long history of problems, with a majority of these problems being exhaust valves sticking and hitting the piston, and many exhaust deviations.

The running conditions of these engines seem to be similar to yours. Is there a way we can get in contact? I would love to know the history of your problems so that we can compare.

Thank you.

Nick