Inspection, in its most basic form, has been around forever. However, like most things in life, what you get out of an activity depends entirely on what you put in. This column is about radical reinvention of the whole concept of machine inspection. It has little to do with conventional practices of doing daily machine rounds.
Assets with moving parts rely on the consistent application of lubricants to function properly. Facility managers who work to improve their condition monitoring strategies benefit from improved asset uptime and cost reductions. These two concepts go hand-in-hand. Lubrication is an essential facet of condition monitoring.
“What are the main parameters for monitoring gearbox lube oil? Our plant has a very low-speed gearbox, and we want to monitor its condition to detect failure symptoms. Is there any relation between a seal failure and the lube oil, such as an increase in the oil’s acid number or wear debris?”
Maintenance is frequently regarded as a necessary evil and tends to be delayed or cancelled to meet production demands. Taking equipment out of service to make repairs or improve functionality can be a tough sell, especially if the only maintenance activity is lubrication. As industry has evolved, so have the practices and philosophies for how and when to perform maintenance and lubrication. More options and tools are now available to guide the actions of personnel for nearly all lubrication tasks. However, to truly understand how this evolution has changed the landscape, you must know where maintenance began and where it is today.
An essential requirement for the optimum performance and service life of a hydraulic pump is that its pumping chambers fill freely and completely during intake. So if getting maximum pump life is your primary concern (and it should be), then anything that makes the free and complete filling of the pump’s chambers more difficult to achieve should be avoided.
