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I disagree. Different engines run different oil pressures, air filtration, quantity of oil, ect. Different dirt injestion would lead to different particle counts, unless you think the filter would remove all of it.
Sure ..so unless you have the same engine as the test subject ..that data would be worthless to you??
Let me say it this way. In a PC test, there are larger particles and smaller particles. We can reason that some of the larger particles will cause resultant smaller particles by knocking around inside the engine. So if we had no filtration ..we would probably see some form of mathmatical relationship between large and small particles. It won't be direct ..but the presense of more large particles will mandate the presense of more small particles.
Small particles can be produced by various sources that are not wear related. Soot from combustion byproducts ..etc.
If you have an abundance of small particles ..when you don't have a substantial amount of large particles ..then you can assume that the filter is doing a good job and the smaller particles are composed of normal decaying metals ..and soot/insolubles.
The filter only traps the larger particles. That's the only figure you need to really see from a PC test for a standard FF filter.
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Filtration efficiency
Pressure drop vs. dirt loading
Pressure drop vs. flow rate
Bypass leakage and operation
ADBV effectiveness
Most of these things are beyond our capability in any economical manner and are typically transparent to the end user anyway. They would also tend to be user specific.
ADBV effectiveness - not a critical issue. Only to stop the filter from being back flushed.
Pressure drop vs. flow rate - flow rates vary from engine to engine ....but PSID is usually very low.
Bypass leakage and operation: If the bypass is open any substantial amount of time ..then the PC would surely show more large particles.
Dirt holding capacity: This would only be possible to measure if the same filter was used on the same engine over extended OCI. Intermediate oil sampling (PC) would be take and the same filter would be left on until PC of the larger particles began to increase "out of ratio of mileage".
I could be wrong with what Tony had in mind here. But PC ..if you look at what can be obtained with PC as the primary test indicator ..can tell you the "bottom line" on how good a filter ...filters. There's no other gauntlet the any filter can run that won't boil down to how well it removed particles.