The really interesting thing about this new media manufacturing process is that we own 100% of the rights to it, meaning we are NOT hamstrung by how we are able to use it either. Most likely it will initially be used in fuel filters, like you said, but that's more of a result of there still being a pressing need for BETTER when it comes to fuel system protection and longer service life of the filters.
There's a good chance this media will be implemented in other filtration product lines, even outside of engine filtration...pretty neat!
I've seen the "skunk works" machine that makes all these prototype media that Kevin and the gang cook up. It's pretty dang cool. Imagine a nanotech cotton candy machine and you're not terrible far off.
It's not just that they have the ability to make amazing media in house, it's that they now have the ability to "tune" media based on combining different kinds for different attributes to add particular margin for particular products where it's needed.
For example, the large industrial products for T4 used a hybrid 3 micron/2 micron Nanonet filter for the 2nd stage of fuel filtration. These filters made incredibly clean, nearly-sterile fuel that allowed our pump and injectors to go 20k+ hours without a pump or injector change at midlife.
The downside to a filter that catches almost everything is that it catches almost everything. We had a particular customer in a particular location in the world complaining about filter plugging. But it was peculiar to their location, nobody else was having the problem.
Because of the amazing media ability they have at Fleetguard/Atmus, they were able to identify the particular fuel contaminant contributing to the premature filter plugging, re-engineer the media to be more than twice as resistant to plugging while still providing the protection the injectors and pump needed to last 20k hours.
As a result, we updated all our fuel filters for the industrial line and gave the customers nearly twice as much life with the same protection using the exact same size filter-- it was media innovation ALONE that allowed the improvement.
I joke with our colleagues that the filter media group in Tennessee is innovating faster than we can test and adopt their innovations. We might need to skip one generation of their improvements just so we can catch up.
Just to calibrate you-- the same size and number of filters that was initially launched for T4 product with a 500hr service life are now being used by some customers for over 2000 hours-- and it's entirely due to media innovation and nothing else!
Hats off to the Fleetguard/Atmus folks-- they are second to none.
