Optical particle counters (OPC’s) have a long history of use in industrial hydraulic applications. Traditionally, their success has been limited to scientific laboratories and other highly controlled environments. However, in recent years, attempts have been made to apply the use of OPC’s to the particle counting of used hydraulic fluids and industrial lubricants. As a result, serious concerns have been raised regarding the accuracy and reliability of OPC’s in such applications.

The objective of this bulletin is to present important facts from reliable and documented sources for the general benefit of existing or prospective users of OPC’s. As particle counting moves into the mainstream of machine condition monitoring, users must have reliable information to identify and select appropriate technologies.

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This isn’t your usual article on how important clean oil is to lubricant health and machine reliability. Yes, we are going to talk about particle contamination, but we’re going to take a much closer look at the destructive traits of this nearly invisible material that cohabitates with our lubricants.

As it turns out, there is a lot more to particles than their size and count. This column will peer into the intricacies of the physical and chemical properties that make up and characterize solid particle contamination.

I’ll begin by discussing 10 particle characteristics that should be important to lubricant analysts and lubrication professionals. Each of these characteristics or traits influences the health of lubricated machinery. While the name of the trait may be familiar, the damage it causes may not be.

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Without the lens of a microscope, bacteria and viruses might only be recognized as painful symptoms of sickness and disease by those who are infected. Just as technology is an important enabler in human pathology, it also serves in the detection and diagnosis of a host of machine health issues, including the invasion of lubricant contamination.

However, for most machinery maintainers, the threat posed by fluid contamination runs contrary to human intuition. Just like a viral infection, in lubrication, it’s what we can’t see that hurts us most. The naked eye is generally blind to the destructive potential of most types of contaminants. In fact, none of our “unaided” human senses can be relied upon to detect and recognize significant concentrations of contamination.

When I first entered the oil analysis field in the 1980s, portable and user-level oil analysis technology was years ahead of its time. This is not so today. Contaminant monitoring instruments have advanced rapidly in the past two decades as has the awareness of its importance. What was previously only the domain of analytical chemists is now an essential maintenance tool available to field technicians and condition monitoring specialists. Thankfully, the “now generation” is largely a population of sophisticated consumer electronics users who also have an insatiable appetite for instant information.

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