Why Oil Analysis

Introduction

Routine Oil Analysis carried out on equipment can provide maintenance personnel with the ability to improve availability rates on equipment, lower downtime and most importantly save companies extraordinary amounts of money that could be used on other maintenance requirements.

Background

In today’s manufacturing design process, enormous efforts are placed on producing cleaner emissions by having tighter, more precise engine tolerances, this creates extra horsepower and extended mileage on fuel and oil. These stringent guidelines and standards were introduced by governments and associated companies to ensure air pollution, fuel and oil usage would be reduced over time.

The necessity on such tolerances have placed enormous pressure on producing cleaner fuels and oils throughout the globe. Oil Manufacturers now have to ensure their products reach and meet a cleanliness standard, this can only be done by using Oil Analysis.

Equipment Manufacturers establish base line limits for each piece of equipment that are released for production. This is done by having scheduled samples taken on numerous equipment around the world and having the data sent back to the Equipment Manufacturers for analysis trending. After enough data sets have been achieved and a mathematical trend can be established, this information is then released as the OEM Limits for that equipment. Data sets that contain water, abnormal silicon results, fuel contamination and a few other sequences are discarded from the analysis trend to ensure a more accurate and repeatable result can be obtained.

Large companies that employ maintenance engineers to provide proactive and preventative maintenance strategies, trend and graph availability rates and produce downtime reports to senior management, these maintenance engineers have already done the hard yards and analytical background work to measure the cost effectiveness of an Oil Analysis program.

How money is saved

An example of costs savings on a single engine is as follows; say you spent $80,000 on parts or an engine replacement, an average oil sample cost you about $30 per sample, equipment usually gets sampled once a month, so you could sample that engine just over 222 times (18½ years) to equal that amount of money spent on the parts or engine replacement that may be needed. Based on this you can safely say, that Oil Analysis could have prevented or reduced the cost of the part or replacement within the 18½ years.

For example, Techenomics Australia sees anywhere from 3000 to 5000 samples per month that are indicating potential catastrophic failure and call for the piece of equipment to be withdrawn from operations and repaired immediately. A catastrophic failure will result in lost productivity, major inconvenience and unplanned costs of a failure as opposed to a planned service event to repair a failing component.

Across the range if only 10% of these potential failures are “saves” then that could amount to about a saving of $30 million. The cost of the analysis is about 0.1 cent per dollar of saving.

Conclusion

One thing is certain, Oil Analysis will find faults within the oil, whether it be wear, contamination, additive breakdown, acid or carbon build-up, viscosity or TBN loss. These are fundamental elements that need to be monitored constantly, they will need to be addressed whenever a change indicates a potential breakdown or failure of the lubricant or an internal component.

A well-established proactive and preventative maintenance program can save companies thousands on the bottom line. By being proactive and ensuring that lubricants and fuels are clean and fall within the standards, equipment components will last longer, reduce fuel and lubricant consumption, and overall, live a longer healthier life.

Oil Analysis can also provide insight information into the lubricants breakdown, possibly even identify other key indicators of the failure that if sampled and picked up earlier, may have prevented this failure from occurring.

Techenomics International is a lubrication and condition monitoring specialist, with over twenty years of experience, offering preventative maintenance tools, including Oil Analysis, to the mining industry and helping companies save millions.

Techenomics operates throughout Australia, Asia, Mongolia and Madagascar. Condition monitoring services include oil analysis, magnetic plug inspections, lubrication and filtration solutions for fixed and mobile plant, all of which will significantly extend the life of equipment, lower unscheduled downtime and most importantly decrease operating costs.

For further information and all enquiries please contact Sam, Email: sreejith.b@techenomics.com

For those in Indonesia and SE Asia contact Freddy, Email:  freddy@techenomics.com

For those in Northern Asia, Mongolia and Russia contact Sugraa, Email: sugraa@techenomics.com

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