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Power play: Fountain Inn engines leading edge of Caterpillar technology

Submitted by: John Warner on Feb 08, 2003 at 6:00 am Tagged with: General Archives Source:

Power play: Fountain Inn engines leading edge of Caterpillar technology
Posted Saturday, February 8, 2003 - 11:08 pm

By By Ed O'Donoghue
BUSINESS WRITER
The Greenville News
eodonogh@greenvillenews.com

A new approach to diesel-engine design promises not just cleaner emissions from
trucks, buses and other large vehicles but also a boom in business for the
Caterpillar manufacturing plant in Fountain Inn.
The midsized engines made there power a vast array of vehicles, from motor
homes and fire engines to farm tractors and front-end loaders. Some power
yachts, and others are stand-alones that generate electricity.
''This plant is and will continue as the sole source of Caterpillar 7- and
9-liter engines" for all of the Americas and most of the rest of the world,
said Mike Adams, its manager.
If the new technology leads to a bigger share of the market, as Caterpillar
expects, the 8-year-old facility in the Southchase Industrial Park could see
production increase by as much as 40 percent, Adams said.
''And since we need about one worker for every engine we produce per day, we'd
have to increase our work force accordingly,'' said Adams, a 33-year employee of
the Peoria, Ill.-based company. Currently, the plant has about 340 workers, 40
of whom were added in recent months, Adams said.
David King, the plant's human resources director, said new hires start at an
hourly wage of about $13 and are eligible for three levels of increases during
their first 18 months. The average for the plant, he said, is in the $15 to $16
range --- less than manufacturers like BMW and Michelin --- but better than
most Greenville-area manufacturers.
Since shortly after it opened in 1994 until about a year ago, the plant
manufactured only one product --- the 3126 --- a 7.2-liter, all-purpose,
do-anything, go-anywhere diesel. Depending on the way it's configured, the 3126
can turn out 175 to 330 horsepower.
This past year, the plant added a line of 9-liter engines, the first of a new
generation based on Caterpillar's new technology.
Less than two weeks ago, the federal Environmental Protection Agency gave the
C-9 diesel a clean bill of health for use in on-road vehicles, and the plant
already is working to fill several big orders.
The certification means the engine meets all pollution-control requirements
through at least 2004. Company officials said the new Advanced Combustion
Emissions Reduction technology --- ACERT in company parlance --- puts
Caterpillar in good stead to meet all regulations through at least 2007, when
even more stringent EPA regulations are to go into effect.
Prior to certification, the engines could be used only in off-road applications
--- in construction and farm equipment, for example.
Adams said a 7-liter sibling --- possibly an eventual replacement for the 3126
--- will be incorporated into the plant's production later this year. The
smaller engine is scheduled for EPA testing this spring to see whether it meets
air-pollution-control standards.
Caterpillar is one of the world's largest makers of heavy equipment and
industrial engines, with manufacturing facilities throughout the United States
and in 24 other countries. Last year, it had sales of more than $20 billion,
with about half domestic and half foreign.
Company officials said it invested nearly $500 million to perfect the
technology now in use at the Fountain Inn plant. Following introduction of the
C-7 line at the Fountain Inn plant, the company expects to roll out at least
four lines of larger ACERT engines at other facilities this year.
Diesel manufacturers, like all engine makers, have been under ever-increasing
pressure from regulatory agencies and environmentalists to reduce emissions.
Already, today's diesel engines on average emit about one-tenth the pollutants
produced by engines from the late 1980s.
The numbers more important to those who buy diesel-powered vehicles are the
fuel mileage figures, and Charles Atchison Sr., owner of Atchison
Transportation Services, said he's seen about a 50 percent increase in fuel
efficiency over the past 10 or so years.
Atchison, who has been in the transportation industry for more than 50 years,
currently has 16 diesels --- 14 motorcoaches and two 15-passenger vans --- and
10 gasoline-powered taxi cabs.
Motorcoach fuel mileage increased from 5 to 6 miles per gallon to 8 to 9 mpg,
and the increase has been even more pronounced for smaller vehicles, he said.
Atchison, who periodically has switched out gasoline engines for diesels in his
taxis, whenever available from the automaker, said there are other financial
considerations as well.
''For one, the engines will last longer --- we've had diesel vans with more than
300,000 miles on their engines. For another, they're cheaper to maintain and to
run,'' Atchison said.
Hoping to squeeze virtually all pollutants from diesel exhausts, Congress and
the federal Environmental Protection Agency have continued to raise the bar,
and diesel engines made after 2006 are supposed to produce less than one-tenth
of what today's engines do. Pollutants are the byproducts and residue from the
incomplete combustion of carbon-based fuels, and the EPA has established
allowable maximums on several, including nitrogen oxide --- NOx --- the main
ingredient in smog, and particulates --- microscopic solids.
While most other diesel engine makers sought methods to remove pollutants from
engine exhausts, Caterpillar looked for a way to address the problem before
pollutants are formed.
The new technology closely monitors and makes microsecond modifications to the
burn mixtures and fuel spray patterns inside an engine's combustion chambers.
''It's a different approach than any other company we have dealt with to date,''
said Rick Gezelle, acting manager of the EPA's Office of Transportation and Air
Quality in Washington, D.C.
As far as EPA is concerned, it makes no difference what technology an engine
maker employs, as long as emission standards are met.
Gezelle said the other engine makers developed systems to recirculate partially
burned fuel from exhaust fumes back into the engine's air intake, to be burned
more completely a second time around.
''Caterpillar is looking more at the combustion process and making some
modifications that affect the process,'' Gezelle said. ''While the other
companies are adding a system to the engine to address the need for reduced NOx
emissions, Caterpillar has taken an internal approach.''
Tom Devine, a former EPA official and now an environmental consultant to
industry, said that from everything he has read, Caterpillar's ''is a lot
cleaner technology, and it's a lot more efficient burning.''
''Now, how good it's going to be in the long run for durability, I don't know,''
said Devine, a principal in the Greenville firm of Kestrel Horizons. ''But
Caterpillar being the type of company it is, they've done a lot of testing on
this before they started to bring it into the market.''
Caterpillar had its start in California in the late 1800s, when Benjamin Holt
replaced horse power with steam power for the massive agricultural combines he
built.
Shortly after the turn of the century, the Holt Manufacturing Co. produced the
first practical track-type tractor to allow the heavy equipment to traverse
soft farm soil.
The company relocated to Peoria in 1909, where it began building
gasoline-powered track machinery and, with the merger with a competitor, the
C.L. Best Tractor Co., in 1925, it officially became the Caterpillar Tractor
Co. In the late 1980s, the company started to move operations out of the Rust
Belt and into the South.
Adams, who joined Caterpillar out of high school in 1969, was part of that
expansion.
He had taken advantage of company incentives to earn both bachelor's and master'
s degrees, and in 1991, he transferred from his native Illinois to North
Carolina, to be operations manager for backhoe production at Caterpillar's
construction equipment plant in Clayton.
He was subsequently promoted to facilities manager for Caterpillar's
transmission manufacturing plant in Leland, near Wilmington, and came to the
Fountain Inn plant as facilities manager in 1999.
The company's strategy in moving south was, in part, to decentralize, to get
away from the large, sprawling industrial complexes it had in East Peoria,
Aurora and Mossville, Ill., for example, and build smaller, single-purpose
facilities, Adams said.
By moving south, the company also left states with high union membership for
states relatively union free.
King said decentralization allowed the company to tap regional pockets of
skilled workers in lower-paying industries, or ones, like textiles, in decline.
Today, Caterpillar operates 28 manufacturing plants and support facilities
throughout the Southeast, with three in South Carolina, four in Florida, five
in Tennessee, and eight each in North Carolina and Georgia.
The Fountain Inn plant is one long conga line of automated equipment that takes
500-pound cast iron engine blocks, machines surfaces to exacting tolerances and
moves them through station after station to be built up with crankshafts,
pistons, electronic control modules, fuel injectors, turbochargers and the
like. In the end, a 3126 engine weighs in at more than 1,200 pounds.
During the process, machinery transfers engines between three different carrier
systems, to allow workers access to all sides of the blocks. At each station,
the worker receives instructions by computer, with both written directions and
photos to show how to accomplish the task.
King said each procedure is automatically checked, and the equipment will not
release a block to the next station until it passes inspection.
There are numerous other inspections and tests at various points throughout the
process, and engines are cold tested --- mechanically turned --- and later hot
tested with fuel from idle speed to highway.
King said it takes about 15 hours for an engine to go from rough block to
finished product, with parts for each being assembled at a nearby warehouse and
shipped to the Fountain Inn plant on an ''on-time'' basis.
While most of the blocks are currently cast in Mexico, most of the other parts
are made in the United States, from fuel injectors from Caterpillar's own
plants in Jefferson, Ga., and Pontiac, Ill.; to turbochargers from the Borg
Warner plant near Asheville; to Kemet Corp. capacitors from Simpsonville and
pumps from the Bosch Rexroth facility just down the street in the Southchase
Industrial Park.
The engines are shipped all over the world, King said, although major users are
the Freightliner truck assembly plant in Gaffney; Blue Bird and Thomas Built
bus companies in, respectively, Georgia and North Carolina; Ford truck assembly
plants in Mexico and General Motors facilities in Canada; and Caterpillar's own
vehicle and equipment manufacturing operations, from as nearby as Clayton,
N.C., to as far away as Sagami, Japan.