It takes only a small amount of water (less than 500 ppm) to substantially shorten the service life of rolling element bearings. There is a vast amount of research that supports this. Being a career-long crusader of clean and dry oil, I will certainly not argue the contrary. In fact, water’s destructive effects on bearings can easily reach or exceed that of particle contamination, depending on the conditions.
Are your lubrication task routes optimized? To many, the idea of a task route might seem simple and straightforward. Can’t you just create a list of machines that need to be lubricated?
The lack of knowledge regarding the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and ISO 21469 is truly astounding, especially considering that violations of this important legislation not only can lead to fines but also jail time for those involved and the boardroom-level leadership.
“Do all environmentally friendly lubricants have approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)? How can you determine if lubricants are compliant with EPA standards?”
These days, reliability professionals are faced with diverse options related to technologies and methods to detect, troubleshoot and remediate problems. Figure 1 is a simple example of the available options to collect data and arrive at decisions regarding the health of machinery and machine components.
