Some good reasons for regular oil analysis

How can we talk about predictive maintenance without mentioning the importance of lubrication and oil analysis?

Did you know that more than 40% of bearings fail before their expected end of life due to poor lubrication? Properly lubricated equipment lasts much longer and oil analysis can validate the effectiveness of the lubrication.

Lubrication is often overlooked

Oil analysis is traditionally done in a laboratory or chemical department where decisions are made about oil changes. This is clearly changing with on-site oil analysis which provides more information and reduces costs. Let's take a look at all the benefits that such an analysis can bring.

Why perform an oil analysis on your equipment?

1. It provides information on the health of the oil. The sooner you know the health of the lubricant you are using, the better off your equipment will be.
2. This is a double advantage: economic and environmental. In fact, doing your own oil analysis generally extends the life of the oil and avoids emptying the oil compartment. Changing oil is intrusive, it can create new problems, and it can be expensive. Therefore, by avoiding draining, you save oil, which is an important benefit for our environment and your wallet!
3. Oil analysis also offers a reliability advantage: it detects recurring failures and reduces the risk of unexpected downtime.
4. Last but not least, doing your oil analysis is a complementary step to other analyses such as vibration analysis. Therefore, it provides more accurate information about the health of the machine.

3 major properties monitored by oil analysis

In addition to all these benefits, oil analysis can monitor your machine in three ways.

1. Check the quality of the oil. It can check its chemical properties: viscosity, acidity and oxidation. The performance of a lubricant depends largely on its basic properties.
2. Check the external contamination of the oil. Dust, water or process contamination.
3. Check the health of the machine. Find early indications of component wear, the root causes of that wear and the severity of the damage.

As you can see, it is clear that oil analysis is a natural ally to other condition monitoring technologies in the pursuit of equipment reliability.

Fabrice Brion CEO
I-Care Group