I’ll be happy to share photos if someone can tell me how to get the Insert Photo button to work. But basically the charge air pulsation damper cracked and came apart. Reason unknown at this time. On hind sight we believe the symptom of the failure occured when we noticed a thick snot like substance on the back flush filters – the pulsation damper failure caused a large amount of fine grey metal particles to enter the oil – the Wartsila technician believes the particles made their way past the piston rings when the air was injested into the cylinder.
We perform monthly oil test. The particle count went up (like a poorly gathered sample) but came down on subsequent samples. We found the failed pulsation damper by accident while opening the engine to determine where the metal particles were coming from. Fortunately, so far we haven’t found any sign the metal made it past the filters.