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Particle Count Comparisons! Fram Ultra vs K&P Reusable Stainless Mesh oil filter
- Thread starter dezlpwr
- Start date
Anything that passes through the filter and is "held" in suspension by the oil can still pass through the oiling system over and over and get between moving parts to cause wear. There was a "boogyman" in Lake Speed's engine ... but of course he did a very extreme test to show the difference between good filtration and cleaner oil vs worse filtration and dirtier oil. As I mention in many threads, if the oil is kept cleaner over the life of the engine, the engine will experience less long term wear and stay in better mechanical condition from less wear.Well we see the oil did a good job collecting and holding all of that extra particles even if it passed through the filter. We might claim "terrible efficiency" but here we are and there is no boogyman.
There have been some examples on BITOG where there was massive engine wear going on, so much that many large metal particles were being seen in the oil filter media, but the wear metals in the UOA didn't bump up very much at all. It wasn't like a giant red flag popping up on the UOA. The UOA wear metals had to be tracked carefully over many UOAs to see the slight wear metal uptick which was the result of major wear going on. A UOA very insensitive to changes in engine wear metals because the UOA can only see wear debris smaller than 5-7 microns. Cutting open the oil filter for careful inspectioin is the best first step to detect anything major going on with engine wear.
How do we get cleaner oil?
Heck, I’d just stick with the metal filter and save money reusing it since you already have it. Maybe unless you intend to extend your ocis out a lot. It’s filtering just fine and you don’t need super efficient filtration for normal ocis while obviously not having any issues with air filtration. A decent off the shelf lube will hold most particle contamination not caught by the oil filter in suspension till it’s dumped out anyway.Well it took a month but I finally got the particle count results back for the K&P stainless mesh reusable oil filter. As expected, it didn't do as well as the Fram Ultra, but I expected worse actually. Same oil and OCI as last time when I ran the Fram Ultra, so about as apples to apples comparison as I could get. Your thoughts? I think I'm going to stick with the Fram Ultra, Endurance or Amsoil oil filters.View attachment 189720View attachment 189721
Efficient air cleaner, well sealed intake system, high efficiency oil filter if you're doing OCIs over say 7500 miles. The shorter the OCI, the less important the filter efficiency. The longer the OCI, the more important the filter efficiency. If you did 500-800 mile OCIs on a well broke-in engine, you wouldn't need much of an oil filter.
The main goal is to keep the abrasive wear due to contaminated oil down to a minimum, so a dirtier sump for less miles could be equal to a cleaner sump with more miles. The cleaner the oil, and the less the number of gallons of oil pumped through the oiling system over an OCI means less wear due to dirty oil.
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All good points. We all want a clean engine & low wear. How you get there will look a little bit different from car to car. Oil can stand to be dirty but still be fully functional in wear protection & cleanliness. There's not specifically any one standard to balance that clean oil destination as you pointed out. One Toyota traveling all highway for 10k may be still cleaner than a 1975 Cadillac at 3k all highway.
How we determine what is "Clean Oil" will be somewhat of a guide of generalities we somewhat know. What vehicle, hwy or city, terrain, filtration, oil used, etc. Does the car have an EGR. We can use PC & UOA to the best of our ability too. The OEM's have done a good job of letting us know when the oil is ready for changing to get at least past the extended warranty periods (I figure most want them to go a little bit further than that) W/oil life monitors it gives us a better balance of convenience and I'd say that incorporating that could help lifespan as well compared to going too far past that interval.
But that's the tricky part about what clean oil is. What is that magic oil change duration in every auto without testing a similar car for bench testing against it to see the difference. OEM ODI on the Volvo says 7.5k so would 3.25k ODI get me an extra 1k or 50k? If I knew I'd be rich b/c I'd own an insurance co...
Even then that’s not an absolute. ICP machines really don’t measure particles they measure elements in solution. As user edhackett has repeatedly noted in great detail it’s actually the aerodynamic diameter and density of the particle that matters, and that can mean being able to only vaporize a “particle” quite a bit smaller than 5 microns. ICP machines prevent plasma destabilization and this includes a filter on the inlet.
Cutting open filters and then performing an acid digestion on the residue is another good way to determine the true contamination.
When I hear the term "dirty oil" I envision the level of wear particles in the oil. So based on the level of "dirty oil", it may not "fully function in wear protection". And oil doesn't stay "fully functional in cleanliness" as the oil gets more dirty with particulate.
The more "dirty" the oil is, the more wear particles there are in the oil, and the more wear they will cause. There is no study ever done that shows that dirtier oil does not result in more wear than cleaner oil with all other factors held constant. The dirtier the oil, and the longer it is ran over and over through the oiling system, the more wear caused by debris grinding between the moving parts, which can also cause more debris to break off and add to the contamination level of the oil.
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I think we agree? Or are you saying the minute the oil is run 1 mile it doesn't have "Full function in wear protection & cleanliness"? I believe that the oil will eventually get to a point of contamination that it will no longer have full wear protection & cleanliness. Is there no sort of "Grace Period" until oil gets too contaminated when additional wear & varnish starts? I would assume a UOA could show additional wear trends that dirty oil would be causing but short of that I'm not sure what else other than what I've mentioned earlier. The studies you mention said the clean oil caused less wear so when did the oil reach the diminishing returns & start additional wear?
I don’t understand what you are saying here. What kind of contamination are you talking about? Are we talking about abrasive wear by contaminates or some sort of oxidation process that results in varnish or sludge? Very different causes between the two. Your post doesn’t make a lot of sense in that regard.
And I don’t understand the whole “grace period”. Abrasive wear has no grace period.
With all factors held constant, except for the level of contamination in the oil, the higher the level of wear particulate there is in the oil, the more wear there can be. I would suspect that if the level of contamination doubled, there would be potential for twice the wear. If the level of contamination tripled, then it would be triple the wear ... and so on.
In the Lake Speed video, the PC of the oil with the wire mesh filter was about 5.9 times higher with 4u and above particles. The paper filter oil was ISO 19 having 3,400 particles per mL for particles 4u and larger, and the wire mesh filter was ISO 22 having 20,000 particles per mL for particles 4u and larger. The virgin test oil "laced with iron particles" was 21,400 particles per mL. Of course, the Lake Speed experiment was very drastic, and no normal engine on the streets will see that level of oil contamination unless it's totally abused and not maintained.
Also, if the oil contamination gets very high, it could cause additional wear as it can cause the wear to cascade to some degree which adds even more wear particulate to the oil ... some particulate too large to detect in a normal UOA, but maybe large enough to see in the oil filter media.
Well, based on your ISO example of 19 vs 22 would that be 3 times the wear?
That would suggest the importance of what a pc test can show which I already alluded to earlier as one tool we have for potential wear.
But OP had an higher ISO code on the mesh filter but it didn't equal any additional wear. It was not tested to the extreme of lakes test so I'd assume that if things are kept reasonable it doesn't equate to that level of additional wear.
I think you bring an important point and my position is when, where, & how that dirty oil comes around to really cause havoc. I just don't think the wear rises to the level in lakes video in a regular car driven regularly. If he happens to run a similar test without high loads, high rpm, and it shows much of the same issues then I'll concede.
Because that type of UOA is very insensitive to determining wear, especially on a short OCI of 2500-2700 miles. Like said before, if the OCI is short the wear factor with dirtier oil will be less significant. If he did OCIs using the same oil and filters, and did OCIs of 10,000-12,000 miles, then you might see a difference in UOA wear metal levels due to the efficiency difference in the oil filters. A close check for any metal particles caught in the filters would also be worth checking.
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I must be on ignore since you never respond to me, but here goes anyway. A $30 spectrographic analysis is not a wear test. Way too many uncontrolled variables, and it’s just not the right test to measure wear.
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Bingo. Conceptually, it's easy to see the allure, pay $30 and you can figure out what the "best" oil is? which produces the lowest wear? Holy crap! When somebody states, or even bothers to explain that it doesn't work that way when some are already so invested in this concept, it's hard to make that come around to reality.
Based on the UOA in this post there was no noticeable additional wear from the prior test. No one is claiming a $30 UOA shows the "Best Oil" or "Which oil produces the lowest wear". A UOA can be used as a trending wear test though.
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So two tests is a trend?
Reasons were given why there could be no real wear difference seen in a couple of short run UOAs. Even the left over oil from one OCI could effect the UOA wear metal counts on the next OCI, depending on how dirty the oil was on the last OCI. Comparing just two short OCIs could make it even less useful of a test method in that case.
Do three 10K mile OCIs in a row with one filter model, then do another three 10K OCIs in a row with the other filter model after doing a clean oil "flush run" before the first run with a different efficiency filter. That would give a better comparison, but it would take 60K miles to see the trend results. UOAs are all about controlled long term trends.
As mentioned, the longer the OCI, the more wear difference could be seen between sump cleanliness levels (particle count levels). But a seen difference in the PC level with only 2500 mile UOAs may not show much if any difference in wear metals. Plus, without looking closely with a 10x-30x magnifier for any visible wear debris in the oil filters (that wouldn't show up on a UOA) is the other needed part of the comparison. It's entirely possible to have elevated wear with visible metal debris caught in the filter, and not see much up-tick in UOA wear metals in one short OCI. It takes long trends to see something like that. Some examples of that have been discussed in other threads about excessive wear and UOAs to detect it.
If you believe the short UOA info, then it still says that very short OCIs don't need as efficient of an oil filter to keep wear from dirty oil in check. That's been mentioned in many threads about how oil filter efficiency can keep the oil cleaner and help reduce wear. The oil filter is the last line of defense once debris gets into the oil, regardless of the source of the contamination. A more efficient filter will always keep oil cleaner than a less efficient filter.
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