Presentation of a Standard Dust Capacity Test Method for Gasoline Vehicle Fuel Delivery Modules

The vehicle fuel delivery module must perform without failure while under the ingested dust contamination conditions in the vehicle fuel system. Calculations for the required dust capacity of a vehicle fuel system are based on the total amount of contamination expected in the fuel tank during the life of the vehicle. The amount of dust that the fuel delivery module can ingest before degrading the performance of the vehicle determines the “Life” of the fuel delivery system. Current testing of the vehicle fuel delivery module requires individual dust capacity testing on each of the filters in the system. This does not account for the dynamics of the filters in series or the affects of the fuel delivery module design. This demands the creation of a standard test method to test the dust capacity of the complete fuel delivery module.

This paper presents the calculations for obtaining the required dust capacity for the vehicle system and introduces a standard test method for conducting dust capacity testing on a complete fuel delivery module. The dust capacity test is a bench test to evaluate the performance of the fuel delivery module as it is exposed to test dust at standard conditions. The considerations required in development and a review of the standard test method is presented.