By Drew Troyer and Jim Fitch
Proceedings of the Electric Power Research Institute, Maintenance and Reliability Conference, August 2001.
Machinery lubrication is critical to reliability efforts at a power plant. Numerous studies cite poor or ineffective management of the lubrication process as a leading cause of forced plant outages. Poor lubrication also compromises efforts to extend intervals between and reduce the duration of scheduled outages. Precision machinery lubrication is a profit-driven, holistic strategy to engineer lubrication maintenance activities and the organization that carries them out. It employs engineered, procedure-driven techniques to optimize lubricant selection, lubrication management and application techniques, organization training and development, and the employment of world-class lubricant analysis techniques. It delivers consistently high lubrication quality that maximizes profit by optimizing lubrication-related costs to own and operate machinery.