If you work in a machinery heavy industry, you will have probably noticed the huge amount of emphasis that is put on maintaining oil cleanliness. You may also be wondering why exactly oil cleanliness is quite so important. Hopefully, this article will go some way to answering your questions.
The importance of oil cleanliness
One of the main reasons why oil cleanliness is vital to the industry is that clean oil will save money, increase productivity and make any company more efficient. The cleaner oil is, the more efficiently it will enable machinery to work, which in turn means that plants can produce more goods in less time, and with fewer machinery failures or production interruptions to boot.
As you will probably know, oil is used for a number of processes, including surface protection and cleansing, heat transfer and power transmission, so it really is a vital component of any machinery operation.
If oil is clean and correctly used in a system, it will stop moving parts from rubbing together and breaking or corroding, but if it has accumulated a lot of dust and dirt, it will not be able to do this as well, or at all in some cases. This is likely to cause machinery failures that could prove to be costly.
Minimum standards for controlling oil contamination
If you want to prevent cleanliness related equipment failures, you must put the following into practice as a minimum:
Oil filtration
Putting a good oil filter in place will work wonders by catching contaminants before oil is even put into machinery.
Air filtration
As oil is circulated around machinery, air will undoubtedly enter the system, replacing the ever-changing quantity of oil as air levels also fluctuate. When this happens, you will need to filter the air to remove small particles in the atmosphere, which can contaminate oil.
Quick-connects
It is also important to install quick-connects on machinery transfer houses. Doing so will help to stop contamination of your transfer hose from elements in the environment. It will also ensure that your tank and reservoir connections are free from leaks.
Oil analysis
Of course, it is also very important that you should conduct oil analysis tests on a regular basis. This will enable you to keep a close eye on the quality of your oil, so that you can clean it up, or change it, before contaminants get to become what could be an even more costly problem.
