Fuel System Preventive Maintenance - What Essential Tools?

The idea of preventive maintenance is, that you do a little work on the front end to save a lot more work and expense on the back end. We're all familiar with taking care of your health - you exercise and eat right. That's preventive maintenance on your body. Professionally, your company spends money on filter and oil changes for its vehicles and equipment. That's preventive maintenance on valuable equipment.

Since today's stored fuels are more prone to problems that past fuels resisted, preventive fuel maintenance isn't optional anymore. Taking care of today's stored fuels is more involved than in the past. And the stakes are higher - not just because, for example, diesel engines are more advanced and more expensive to fix, but also because fuels cost a lot more than they used to.

A comprehensive fuel preventive maintenance program requires certain essential elements and tools for it to work.

Essential Tools For Fuel Preventive Maintenance

Biocides

Fixing and preventing microbial contamination is at the top of the list for stored fuel care. A biocide treatment is an essential tool for that, as biocides are the only thing that will kill microbes and resolve contamination fully.

Biocides are not the only thing you'll want to have on hand to stay on top of this. Next-generation microbe detection and monitoring technology will ensure that the job of killing microbes is done. If you don't use some type of testing to confirm the job is done, you're left relying on assumptions and hopes.

Corrosion Protection

Protecting storage tank surfaces from corrosion is important, too. Killing microbes will eliminate one of the pillar causes of corrosion in tanks. Adding a liquid corrosion inhibitor to the fuel gives your tank an added layer of protection that will help in the long run. There are options for this that often combine multiple functions - some corrosion protectants also break up sludge and biomass in the tank. Those are very useful to use in your process.

In addition, there's even a biocide you can use that provides corrosion protection alongside its microbial-killing ability. That biocide chemistry is known as MBO and it has the trade name ClearKillin the United States (it's been used as Grotamar in Europe for decades). It's always good if you can do multiple important things at once.

Fuel Stabilizers

A third essential tool is something to chemically stabilize the fuel to keep it from darkening in storage. Killing the microbes is an important step to removing one of the causes of instability in the fuel. But you need to add a stabilizer beyond this. A fuel stabilizer will protect the fuel against the kind of chemical reactions that inevitably happen as the fuel is exposed to oxygen, water, and other bad actors in its storage environment. A stabilizer is the only thing that will do this - in other words, there's no shortcut for getting around having to use one.

The big recommendation for stored fuel preventive maintenance is not to take shortcuts. It's always easier to do a job right if you have the right tools.