DNV’s new voluntary class notation FUEL offers owners an easy and consistent way of achieving predictable performance of fuel treatment and conditioning systems.

The new class notation is a total system approach designed to manage important issues such as the sizing and efficiency of purifiers, arrangements of fuel bunker tanks to minimize the risk of mixing incompatible fuels, arrangement and sizing of settling tanks to ensure good separation of water and sludge, capacity of fuel heaters and requirements for performance of temperature- and viscosity controls.

A performance test standard for fuel oil purifiers has been developed together with GL as part of the notation. Efficiency of separation was determined to give viscosities of fuel oil through a standard test procedure using Dyno-spheres as a contaminant in specified test oil. This procedure offers very accurate repeatability of the efficiency of measured separation. The correlation between the separation efficiency of the artificial contamination with Dyno-spheres and real life residual fuel has been determined through extensive testing.

The results have made it possible to get a unified standard for independent verification of performance. A type approval of purifiers with certified flow rate will be offered by DNV.