Industry rides on a film of oil. The oil’s viscosity bears the load and defines the extent of clearance achieved between working surfaces. Sometimes that clearance is thick and bountiful, and other times it is deflated or extinct. Without viscosity, most machines would rapidly self-destruct with mechanical friction and wear.

There is also a well-known penalty and reliability risk from too much viscosity. Like most things, the selection of a lubricant’s viscosity must be optimized to enable needed protection and disable the danger from excessive viscosity. For instance, too much viscosity can cause churning losses and excessive heat generation from molecular friction. It can also impede lubricant movement and flow to lubricant-hungry surfaces.

One of the most famous disadvantages of too much viscosity is high energy consumption. In recent years, we’ve seen automaker-specified viscosity being lowered in crankcase service from 5W40 to 5W30, and now in some cases to 5W20. These changes are all for the sake of energy conservation.

Of course, the primary driver for energy conservation is not to save money on fuel or electricity but rather to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, which emit harmful gases (carbon dioxide, nitric oxides, hydrocarbons, etc.) into the atmosphere as a byproduct of combustion.

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The food processing industry presents unique challenges to lubricant formulation engineers, lubricant marketers, plant lubrication engineers, equipment designers, and builders. While it is never desirable for lubricants to be allowed to contaminate raw materials, work-in-progress. or finished product, the consequences of a lubricant contaminated product is rarely more acute than in the food processing industry. As such, lubricants used in this industry have requirements, protocols, and performance expectations that go well beyond typical industrial lubricants.

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In the interest of reducing purchasing costs and streamlining storage and handling, many organizations have substantially slashed the number of lubricant SKUs (stock keeping units) they use. They have also re-engineered the precision of their lubricant specification. There are many real and a couple of somewhat imaginary benefits to these consolidation initiatives. Let’s start with the real benefits.

These include:

Reducing stale inventory by directing more turnover (usage) across fewer lubricant products

Purging discontinued or hard-to-find lubricants from lubricant storerooms

Sole sourcing lubricants to a single distributor and perhaps brand to simplify the purchasing function and leverage volume buying (see figure 1)

Enhance usage convenience and lower risk of accidental cross-contamination (fewer drum pumps, transfer systems, filter carts, top-up containers, etc.)

Re-engineering and enhancing lubricant selection especially for machines utilizing lubricants that have drifted out of spec (perhaps as a result of several past consolidation attempts)

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Too often the viscosity index (VI) is disregarded as a lubricant selection parameter. One reason is simply because it is poorly understood. Some people think the viscosity index is incorporated in the ISO Viscosity Grade, but it is not. It stands alone as an independent lubricant performance differentiator.

We all know that viscosity is the single most important physical property of a lubricant. It is a crude measure of a lubricant’s molecular constitution from the standpoint of hydrocarbon chain size. Viscosity is determined by creating friction between the molecules from fluid movement. The higher the intermolecular friction (longer molecular chains), the higher the viscosity.

Viscosity determines film thickness and film strength in machines. It also influences other important factors such as those in the table below.

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By some estimates, condition monitoring has been around for more than a century, but it is only within the last 5-10 years (and particularly the last 2 or 3) that interest has been at fever pitch. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies are involved in manufacturing or selling services or equipment for lubricant analysis, wear metals analysis, and vibration analysis, any and all of which can be part of a condition monitoring program. Within the realm of oil analysis itself are many types of tests that can be performed and many instruments that can be used to measure factors of interest. What distinguishes condition monitoring from other uses of oil analysis is not so much the specific techniques used as it is the repeated performance of testing and (most important) the tracking and trending of the results to determine changes in the health of an equipment-lube system over time. Using this information, the practitioner can take proactive measures to avert damage and downtime, saving money, time, and resources.

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