NEW ORLEANS—Predictive maintenance platform provider Intangles has added DPF regen analysis to its AI-powered product suite for the transportation industry. The new feature is designed to optimize the fuel efficiency and the diesel engine performance of commercial vehicles, company representatives explained during a press briefing at the American Trucking Associations Technology Maintenance Council’s Annual Meeting & Transportation Technology Exhibition.
Currently, fleets can access only very limited information about DPF performance, namely the percentage of clogging (or soot load) in the particulate filter. The Intangles solution not only monitors the performance of the DPF system in real time but also predicts future performance of the system based on environmental and vehicle-specific conditions. The insights are accurate enough to forecast excess costs, in dollars, due to DPF inefficiency, according to Intangles.
“We’re always looking for ways to leverage our physics-based AI to save fleets time and money,” said Craig Vanderheide, director of product management. “This new feature is designed to take the guesswork out of forced DPF regens and keep soot levels at an optimal level. Fleets deserve to have better insights when it comes to DPF.”
And taking the guesswork out of regens is important to fleets for a very basic reason, added Intangles North America President Alan McMillan.
“This particular solution is helping solve the tension between maintenance and operations,” McMillan said. “The maintenance guy tells the driver to do a regen but, no, the driver wants to deliver the load. There's a lot of times they actually don't have to pull over, so we're empowering those two groups to make the right decision.”
See also: How fleets can improve DPF reliability
The DPF solution is built using Intangles’ proprietary hardware, adaptive algorithms, and scalable cloud infrastructure to solve problems in new ways. Intangles leverages “digital twin” technology to create a virtual replica of a vehicle’s DPF in the cloud. Once a replica is created, Intangles can test how the virtual DPF will perform under varying conditions such as extreme cold weather, periods of prolonged idling, or stop/start driving situations, which can be particularly hard on DPF clogging.
As a result, the Intangles solution not only predicts how a truck’s DPF will perform in differing conditions but also grants insight into how best to optimize soot load and regeneration.
“Thanks to the approach we’ve taken, in the coming months, this solution will work effectively in most of the makes and models that we currently support worldwide. We currently cover over 2,000 engine configurations and are adding more daily,” says Vanderheide. “And our hardware can be installed seamlessly alongside any existing telematics device. It’s important to us to keep things simple for our customers.”
What it does
Intangles’ DPF solution:
- Monitors and measures the percentage of soot in a vehicle’s DPF in real-time
- Informs the user of the quality of each DPF regeneration
- Provides insights on the impact of inefficient regeneration
- Guides users on how to optimize forced DPF regeneration
- Optimizes fuel efficiency, engine performance, and extends the life of a vehicle
The Intangles DPF solution is an “advanced prognostic,” which is now available on the company's predictive maintenance platform and is part of a larger suite of vehicle health tools designed to detect issues with vehicles well before a diagnostic trouble code is triggered. The company boasts nearly 200,000 trucks on the platform worldwide, and it has accumulated some 60 terabytes of data to inform the AI analysis and alerts, “whether it be hours or days before the trouble codes are generated," McMillan explained.
The Intangles platform offers fleets a full suite of actionable insights, including real-time alerts, critical diagnostic trouble codes with severity and repair strategies, precise fuel analysis tools, driver behavior monitoring solutions, vehicle tracking, and best-in-class fleet performance tools all on one intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
