The alarms or limits actually relate more to the componentry in the equipment than the oil type itself. Even though if you were to change oil types or choose to use a heavier or lower grade viscosity, this may have severe impacts on the limits, it still does not have a direct relationship with the alarm levels themselves.
When establishing baseline limits (Alarms) the Oil type be taken into account, such as if we were to look at generating new baseline limits for a 903E Dump Truck Engine, we would need to set some ground rules to begin with.
We would need to eliminate all samples that contain water, glycol or fuel ingress, reject samples that contain sodium, silicon, and potassium at certain ppm levels, then we would need to look at how many samples we can gather from the same type of equipment using a similar oil type (i.e. 15W-40), these samples need to have been taken at the same interval (i.e. 250hrs). We would then look at eliminating samples due to equipment age and get the data as closely matched as possible, this will allow a history pattern of normal wear and tear to be established for baseline data, some mathematical equations are then used to create the Normal, Warning and Problem limits.
If you wanted to create baseline data that relates specifically to the oil type, you would need to establish some ground rules before this could be possible. One of the biggest issues I see with trying to do this is getting enough history of the same equipment and compartments running the same oil type. To establish a good confidence level you would need to have more than 50 samples from at least 10 machines.
