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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Try this simple experiment. With notepad in hand, go out into your plant and walk around a sampling of your most critical machines. These are the ones that have high probability of failure and/or the greatest consequences of failure. They are also known as show-stoppers and, as such, generally merit a disproportionate allocation of reliability and maintenance resources.

Next, on your notepad make a list of all the lubrication-related enhancements that have been implemented on these same machines since they were commissioned. Take special note of those that have been applied in the past five years. Solicit any amount of help (from old-timers, for instance) you need to flesh out your list.

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It seems counterintuitive that lubricants selected to optimize wear control may not be optimum when it comes to energy conservation. In fact, in view of today’s growing pressure to reduce demand on nonrenewable energy resources and increase operating profits, we are definitely facing a shift of emphases from past lubrication objectives. Energy-conserving lubrication offers motivation on several fronts.

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The majority of wear related failures occur as the direct result of particulate contamination. A recent article published in Lubrication Engineering magazine concludes that more than 82% of wear related losses are contaminant induced. And, the largest portion of this is abrasive wear; the direct result of particles wedged between rolling and sliding surfaces.

According to work done by SKF, bearings can have “infinite life” when the influence of particle contamination is eliminated. In some cases more than a 75-times life extension can be achieved by maintaining exceedingly clean lubricating fluids. It is also worth noting that the penalty associated with a contaminated lubricant is identical to that of using a lubricant with just 25% of the recommended viscosity.

There are few forms of internal machine failure that don’t release particles into the lubricant; detecting increases in particle contamination can be extremely important. Figure 1 lists some of the failure types detectable using contaminant monitoring.

As a predictive maintenance technique, abnormal particle trends are the early symptoms of several non-particle induced conditions. Once the abnormal trends are recognized, a more precise assessment of lubricant condition or machine malfunction can be pursued.

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