In leading maintenance organizations, managers don’t shrug off the importance of cleanliness. Instead, we are seeing these companies intrepidly improve fluid cleanliness targets over and over in their quest to enhance machine reliability. However, this practice has led to new challenges relating to both the ability to achieve the new targets and the cost of cleanliness. Filter flow rate is the opportunity.

Consider this: When you reset your target cleanliness by reducing the ISO Code by one number in each range-number slot, say from ISO 19/16/13 to ISO 18/15/12, then you will have approximately half as many particles in each gallon (or liter) of oil. This will, of course, reduce the number of potential abrasive contacts within your machine by around 50 percent – your goal.

Once you achieve this new cleanliness target (say, with the aid of a portable flushing filter), your system filter will be removing half as many particles as before. After all, a filter can remove only those particles it sees. If you reduce the number of particles it sees by 50 percent (caused by the new ISO target) then your particle removal rate will be lowered by the equivalent number unless you change something else. The risk is a gradual increase to previous contaminant levels (ISO 19/16/13).

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There is a price tag for removing dirt from oil. For large plants and fleets operating in dusty environments, the cost can be substantial – hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Of course we all know that contamination control is optional, like dental hygiene – we don’t have to brush all our teeth, only those we want to keep.

That said, where quality filtration is needed, we still have a few options to get the most cleanliness for the fewest filtration dollars. After all, throwing money at the problem doesn’t take brilliance; however, achieving oil cleanliness at economy rates is the domain of the astute maintenance professional.

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By now, organizations that have advanced reliability and maintenance programs understand the intrinsic value of lubricant cleanliness. Noria and many others have published extensively on this subject. The business case is rock solid: the cost of preventing oil from becoming dirty (exclusion and removal) is a small fraction of what machine repairs and downtime will cost down the road. The sad truth is that many asset owners are under the a false impression that their filters are doing a good job and their oils are clean enough.

Just as it is true that not all lubricants are alike, the same holds true for filters. Filter manufacturing is a very competitive and diverse industry from the standpoint of cost, quality and performance. Owners of large equipment fleets can spend well over $1 million per year on filters. Industrial plants with extensive asset lists can face a similar filtration spend. A single filter element used on a large circulating oil system can cost more than $1,000.

While there are commodity (economy grade) filters of all types to choose from, as with many products, the greater value and quality often come from selecting the premium option at the high end of the price range. Yet, most premium high-performance filters can look very similar to cheaper, lower cost filters at first glance. Published data on filter performance by their suppliers is often embellished or out-of-date. After all, a filter supplier would never publish anything other than stellar performance data, and this data is usually the product of their own laboratory.

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When the history of the condition monitoring field is written, there will likely be a chapter, or at least a few pages, on the odd paradox surrounding how infrequently use of used filter testing was employed (in the beginning). The assumption is that filter testing will eventually enjoy widespread use as misconceptions and ignorance of its benefits fade away. As I write today, the vast majority of people engaged in condition monitoring are oblivious to the wealth of information found in used filters.

The target application relates primarily to critical equipment, i.e., those that are expensive to repair or have high downtime costs. A well-engineered condition monitoring program should align the data being gathered with the failure modes we seek to detect. Granted, these are failure modes of highest risk to the machine, based probably on occurrence and consequences (business interruption, etc.).

Think of the logic behind this. Filters are intended to purify by removing solid contaminants that are harmful to the oil and the machine. If the filter is doing a good job, it is removing contaminants as fast as they are entering (ingression). This is known as mass balance. The number of particles coming into the oil system (particle ingression) equals the number being caught by the filter (particle removal); this achieves a stabilized and controlled oil cleanliness level. While particle removal is advantageous to the oil and the machine, it gets very low marks when the oil being cleaned is sampled for analysis.

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Numerous methods have been developed to selectively remove water and other volatile contaminants from hydraulic and lubricating fluids. These methods include absorbent filter media and regenerable adsorbent packings and the like. In many cases, it is not economical or practical to use disposable media, and as a result, continuous scrubbing processes have been developed. These processes are available in a variety of designs and are universally referred to as oil reclamation systems.

The most common scrubbers are derivatives of vacuum distillation processes used in refineries. The process involves expanding oil to produce high surface area to facilitate the vaporous extraction of water and certain other contaminants.

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Filtration has two primary objectives. The first objective is “protective”. This refers to creating a barrier to protect particle-sensitive machine components from the invasion of contaminants capable of causing sudden-death machine failure. Machines that have high mission criticality from the standpoint of safety, lost production and/or repair cost are good candidates for protective filtration. Such filters are located just upstream of sensitive components. Many components don’t require wear in order to fail, but they can experience critical loss of performance due to motion impediment and/or flow blockage caused by the intrusion of particles of a particular size and composition. Servo-controlled electro-hydraulic valves are examples of such components that benefit from protective filtration.

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Let’s face it: Machines in industry are largely made of iron and steel. Ferrous metals both encase these machines and bear the brunt of most friction, wear and corrosion. Often, the most critical machine components, parts and surfaces are those that possess the greatest intrinsic strength and wear resistance. In more than 90 percent of the cases, these mission-critical components have iron-based metallurgy. Common examples include cams/followers, gear teeth, shafts/journals, rolling elements and raceways of bearings, pistons and cylinders, mechanical couplings, chain drives, screw drives, and rotors.

As machines age and wear, metal is lost to the lubricating oil or grease. The rate of wear is directly proportional to the growing ferrous particle population in our lubricants and filters. These mobilized wear particles pose even greater risk in causing collateral damage elsewhere in the machine. Common examples include particle-induced abrasion, surface fatigue and motion impediment of sliding and rolling parts. So, too, it is well known that metallic particles are a principal root cause of lubricant aging and base oil oxidation.

With rare exception, ferrous particles caused by mechanical wear are also ferromagnetic, meaning these particles have inherent magnetic susceptibility. In some cases, this attribute is a drawback (e.g. the potential interference of solenoid actuators), but in most cases, it presents a distinct opportunity for efficient wear particle removal and detection.

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Just like lubricants, filters have a life expectancy, and it’s not indefinite. Users should be aware that there are certain operating conditions that can abruptly alter a filter’s performance and shorten its service life. These events can silently turn what you think is a filter into a non-filter. The unpleasant consequences of most filter failures are particles that get a free ride into sensitive machine components and frictional surfaces, leading to damage and premature failure.

Sadly, most filters used on machines and vehicles have a limited ability or no ability to alert operators and technicians to faulty performance. Some may have pressure-differential (P-D) alarms or gauges, but even these devices can only respond to a fraction of filter-related problems that may occur. Of course, the most common condition to which these P-D indicators alert is a filter that is becoming plugged or is already in bypass. However, they can’t announce warnings for a host of other problems that often contaminate downstream fluids and components.

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