[YachtForum]

One of our members received the following notice from CAT...

There have been several product reliability issues with the C9 generator sets in operation that have caused significant concern in the market place. Caterpillar has been actively working to insure any product issues that were the fault of the Caterpillar product have been addressed. This note is a summary of the issues and the status of actions taken.

1) Aftercooler Core: The C9 aftercooler core is experiencing a short life due to erosion of the core resulting in leaks of sea water into the engine. An improvement to the design is currently under evaluation and will be made available as soon as we have completed our validation to insure that this new design is adequate. To insure the in use product does not have a problem, Caterpillar has put in place a program to pro-actively replace aftercooler cores every 1500 service hours until we have the new design available. The current schedule is such that we plan to have a new design of core available, if all goes well, in the June or July time frame this year. All cores will be replaced with the new design as quickly as possible.

2) HEUI Pump: Early in the production of the C9 engine a problem was identified with the high pressure HEUI pump and several pump failures occurred. This problem was quickly solved with a new design of pump and this has been in production since July 1, 2005. Most if not all pumps have been replaced in the field and there are no known failures of this new design for the failure mode previously seen. Reports of a new failure mode of bearing failures in the pump have surfaced due to failures in applications other than marine. This failure mode is not a marine problem of significance with only one known failure to date however an improvement will be made for other applications and used in marine also later this year. No field retrofits are required due to the near zero failure rate


3) Smoke: Initial production engines showed higher than acceptable smoke at low loads. This problem has been addressed with an updated software file and engines now have invisible smoke across the operating range. Degradation of smoke has been seen over time due to the creation of deposits on aftercoolers and turbochargers from the crankcase fumes closed loop system. These systems, installed in most cases by our distributors and not by Caterpillar, have not proved to be highly efficient. In many cases a RACOR system was installed. We have identified an improvement to utilize a new style of filter element (Cat part no. 274-7913) in the RACOR system and a requirement to change it every 250 hours to reduce this oil fouling problem. It was found that in many cases where we had complaints, the filter had never been changed. Because this is not a Caterpillar supplied system we do not have complete technical validation of the performance of the system but have seen acceptable life on many engines using these new guidelines. Ultimately however, it is expected that aftercooler cores and turbochargers will require cleaning at some interval when engine smoke becomes unacceptable.

4) HEUI Oil Line - Due to an assembly problem there were failures of the high pressure oil line feeding the HEUI pump on several engines. The factory installation procedure has been changed as well as the tube design and this problem has not re-occurred.

We understand that the C9 gen set has not met the expectations of the market and we fully understand the problems this can cause on a vessel. We have worked to address all the known problems and feel we have solutions to them either in place or coming soon for the aftercooler core. We regret the inconvenience this has caused and the short term inconvenience currently due to the need to change aftercoolers however that situation will be remedied soon when the new improved aftercooler design is available mid-year.