- Arguably one of the most recognisable names
and faces when it comes to the aftermarket diesel tuning world is Gale Banks from Banks
Power. In particular we're big fans of Gale's YouTube
channel, we love his analytical approach to analysing certain aspects of diesel engine
performance and the way he develops his products. While the power's one side of the coin,
particularly ere in the US where the EPA are really cracking down on emissions
in particular, making sure that you're making good power with reliability but also
remaining emissions compliant is quite important and of course on the diesel
engines, modern diesel engines, we've got diesel particulate filters,
you've got diesel exhaust fluid injection into the exhaust system for catalyst effect
so how much can we do while retaining that equipment? I know a lot of people want to take all of that
away and throw it away. - That's over, those days are gone. Full deletes are so illegal and now the
EPA is on the purveyors, the guys who have provided the electronic aspect of that. We've never done that aspect, because we
have our own ECU, if we want to build an emissions free engine for racing we do it. But the average truck driven on the street,
and this depends on the level of enforcement in whatever state you live in. It used to be, and still is very tight in
California but now I think 14 or 15 other states have adopted California but the big
dog EPA is all over this and they're taking out the people who have done this because
it's criminal. So at the end of the day we look at,
like the DPF, much of the aftermarket tuning provides
additional fuel, some of which does not get consumed in the cylinder. So if you do a smokey diesel tune you're
putting smoke in the air rather than using that fuel energy in cylinder. We don't go there, we have an AVL device
that measures the micro soot going into the DPF. We also can look at soot loading in the DPF
so when we do a tune, we accept the fact that there's back pressure because of the oxy
cat, there's two catalytic devices and a DPF. So it adds up to four or five pounds of back
pressure. Also on the Fords and the GMs, from the DPF
out, they're blending cool air with hot air. So you don't put out extremely high temp
1100 degree exhaust out of the tail pipe tip during regen. - So there's a lot going on there and I think
one of the aspects is before these diesel particulate filters were commonplace,
we did see a lot of smokey tunes and rolling coal was pretty commonplace, a lot of people
want that, however we do see that in simple terms, very very simple terms, adding
additional fuel into a diesel engine, to a degree is going to increase the power
but the problem with the DPF is if you aren't really aware of what's going on,
you can be creating a smokey tune pre DPF and then essentially making more
power but just filling up the DPF? - That's why we use the micro soot analyser. - So that micro soot analyser, you're looking
at the soot output straight out of the engine basically pre DPF so you know how
much extra load you're placing on the DPF? - Yeah and you don't want to regen it
constantly. The back pressure across a DPF is a function
of its soot load. So we don't want to have it regening all
the time, we don't want its average back pressure to be higher than stock so we
really watch the regen cycle rate on a stock truck is our bogey, we don't want
additional regens. - Now I probably should go back there
because a lot of our viewers may not actually even know what a regen cycle is
so essentially that DPF collects the particulate matter in the exhaust and it
will fill up over time so the regen cycle is used to essentially super heat the DPF and
burn off that soot. Basically freshening is ready to collect more,
is that a simplistic enough way of looking at it? - Yeah but you burn fuel to create that heat. - So that also reduces your fuel economy so
it's not a win win situation. - No so we tune our inline devices to honour
a specific air/fuel ratio, a specific soot output. - So essentially you've got it as good as it
can possibly be with the DPF in place? - So we're diminishing the pumping losses
as the piston rises on the exhaust stroke by reducing back pressure, we don't get
rid of all of it but we get rid of a significant percentage so we combine
better air density in, less restriction out and that allows us to tune more aggressively. And makes the engine a hell of a lot more
efficient. - Now another thing I want to touch on there,
you're sort of just getting towards that anyway is the diesel engine tuning, I've sort
of mentioned before, in broad terms we can add fuel, we're going to end up making more
power, we're adding fuel ending up with a richer air/fuel ratio. Of course the aspect of that is we do end up
creating a lot more heat and this is where we need to manage that heat with the diesel
engine tuning in order to remain reliable. The problem with a lot of the diesel trucks,
particularly here in the US is they are used for towing very heavy loads and we can
get into a situation where you can create a tune that's perfectly safe and very powerful
on an unladen truck but then go and put a very heavy load on it, tow it up a hill
and it's a very different situation. How are you managing that when you're
deciding on where the safe area is for your tunes? Is it through monitoring and controlling
EGT directly or do you have a benchmark? - First of all we're keenly aware of constant
duty. Our military engines have to pass a 400
hour NATO test 85% of which is at full torque or full horsepower. Two hours full torque, two hours full horse,
that's everything the engine will do. You'll never see that in a pickup truck. So we engineer all of our tuning to do
exactly what you just talked about at any altitude with any air inlet density you
come up with. If you're a cowboy and you do the old
smokey tune and try to push it through a DPF, you'll soon plug up that DPF but
secondly the heat, you mentioned heat a minute ago. We're looking at EGT of course but we're looking
at air/fuel ratio and air/fuel ratio is the prime thing here. If the OEs at 18:1 air/fuel, that's our bogey. So how do we get more air into the engine,
how do we get that compressor to produce more air density so we can mix that air
mass with fuel mass. Same EGT if you're at the same air/fuel
ratio, it's pretty, they relate to each other. - So essentially while you're adding more fuel,
you're also adding more air so you're getting a larger combustion charge inside the engine
but maintaining essentially an OE air/fuel ratio target? - That's it, exactly. My goal is with intake, exhaust and tuning,
to 70 to 100 more horsepower and torque, 120, 140 pound feet and stay within the design
of all the major components on the engine and the exhaust system. I'm a racer. Holding back like that is tough to do. I get the idea of why guys want a full delete
'cause now you can just blow smoke. I've never ever had a diesel record holding
vehicle that smoked and we've held quite a few so that being the case, including
Bonneville, we ran that first common rail Cummins, no smoke, 222 miles an hour. - I think it's reasonable to say that with the
continued drive towards improved or reduced emissions, we're going to see less and less
smoke and more and more people focusing on making sure that the tune will work with
all of those emissions components in tact. Look Gale it's been great to get some insight
into that, I think it's fair to say we live in a pretty exciting time with the current crop of
diesel engines, the amount of performance that we are able to get out of them so
hopefully you guys will continue producing great products so thanks for the chat there. - Thank you. - If you liked that video
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