Introduction 

This article is the first in a series to make a strong case for performing more and better testing of in service lubricants in order to replace unplanned repairs and unplanned downtime with planned repairs during scheduled time. In other words, this article is about using oil analysis to help improve reliability, planning and scheduling. More and better testing involves more lubricant sample points with better focus on large wear particle analysis.

Introduction 

Comprehensive oil analysis requires sampling, testing and analyzing in-service industrial lubricants to evaluate the wear condition of machinery, the contamination condition of lubrication systems, and chemistry condition of the lubricants. This article intentionally focuses attention on analysis of large wear particles because the resulting analysis information enables informed users time for planned maintenance instead of surprise, reactive unplanned repairs.

Practical Steps to Increase Your Site’s Ability to Detect
and Manage Abnormal Lubrication Events

There is a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and how these can be applied in all areas of reliability programs, particularly oil analysis. In this technology, many users struggle to understand and trust how alarms are set, maintained, and adapted to meet the changing conditions with lubricated mechanical equipment. All of these intelligence initiatives are ineffective if the data is not trustworthy.

Spectro Scientific's Oil Analysis Handbook

This Oil Analysis Handbook covers a wide variety of topics ranging from specific oil analysis techniques to applications for oil analysis, to success stories of companies that use on-site oil analysis to lower costs and improve uptime. The applications for oil analysis range from mining and trucking to water treatment, service providers, and industrial plants.  Learn how to improve reliability while cutting maintenance costs and avoiding costly downtime.

Ametek Spectro Scientific and Grabner Instruments recently released Fluid Management Academy, an online learning management system offering courses for Spectro Scientific and Grabner Instruments’ products and software.

In a recent plant reliability survey, between 60 to 70% of industrial facilities consider oil analysis an important part of their reliability programs[1]. Oil analysis gives a snapshot of machinery health, preventing unnecessary oil changes and assisting in predicting equipment failures. This paper will take a detailed look into using data to decrease maintenance costs and increase the bottom line. Being able to extend oil drains or even shorten them to eliminate failures, can be an easy way to reduce maintenance costs, but data must be available that allows for making those decisions. This paper will address the role of key performance indicators (KPI’s) in predictive maintenance, how to gather useful data that aligns with KPI’s and review a few case studies where on-site labs were able to use data to take advantage of warranty periods, justify keeping assets after warranty and extend oil drains to reduce oil consumption.

Aircraft gas turbine engines use synthetic polyester fluids since they are formulated to handle a wide range of severe operating conditions. The factory supplied Spectroil M/N program for compliance to the JOAP program uses D19 and D12 standards which are prepared from a mineral oil hydrocarbon base stock. For applications which require improved accuracy for polyol ester based oils, the SpectrOil analyzer offers a new calibration program called POE8 TURBO with matrix-specific elemental standards.

The Dakar Rally 2021 finishes up in Saudi Arabia, and the event is known for how tough it is on race vehicles and support teams. We learned a lot about how the Minilab 123 EL solution is used by Motul for on-site oil analysis, with the SpectrOil oil analyzer, in their mobile lab during the 2018 Dakar rally.  See Motul’s 2018 article below to learn how testing the oil of an engine is like analyzing someone’s blood.  That’s an impressive support truck and mobile lab!

Lisa Williams, Ametek Spectro Scientific’s technical solutions specialist discusses reliability and problem-solving strategies working with end-users.

STLE member Lisa Williams is a results-focused solution provider working in reliability engineering and tribology for the past 13 years. Specializing in lubricant analysis, she currently serves as a technical solutions specialist on the product management team at Ametek Spectro Scientific. She holds STLE’s Certified Lubrication Specialist™ (CLS) certification and also holds the Level I Machine Lubricant Analyst (MLA I) and Level II Laboratory Lubricant Analyst (LLA II) certifications with the International Council of Machinery Lubrication. She currently serves as vice chair of the ASTM D02.CS96 Committee for In-service Lubricant Testing and Practices and served as the technical lead on two ASTM standards for in-service grease sampling and analysis, ASTM D7718 and ASTM D7918. Williams holds a bachelor’s of science degree in chemistry from York College of Pennsylvania and a master’s of business administration from Elizabethtown College.

Point of care solutions provide the maintenance team with accurate answers about equipment when needed. This is especially important when teams are working in 24/7 operations. Waiting for data to come back in days or weeks to make important decisions is not viable.

Oil analysis is essential to identify problems so they can be corrected before they cause equipment to go down for major repairs. A multinational mining firm was using an outside lab for oil analysis, but there were some real limitations with this approach:

• The cost of this approach limited the number of samples that could be analyzed.
• In addition, the four-day lead time to receive the results created the risk that damage could occur before results were obtained.
• Further, unpredictable delays or interruptions in shipping to the off-site lab can have huge impacts to keeping critical machinery running.

They overcame this problem by creating an in-house lab based on the SpectrOil 100 rotating disk electrode (RDE) atomic emission spectrometer and the Spectro FTIR oil analyzer. The mine can now obtain oil analysis results in only 12 minutes, and the reduced cost per sample has made it possible to increase the number of samples analyzed by nearly a factor of ten. In its first year of operation, the in house lab has identified savings of over a million dollars in downtime and over a million dollars in repairs with several of the larger incidents generating savings that completely paid for the purchase price of the instruments.