Oil contamination may be defined as any foreign material found in the lubricant which is not added by design. Usually, contaminants are not beneficial, and may be detrimental, to the performance of the oil and/or the operating machinery. Contamination is a significant root cause of machine and lubricant degradation and failure. Often overlooked as a source of failure because its impact is usually slow and imperceptible, contamination is both a significant threat to reliability and quality efforts, and an opportunity because improvements are very attainable1. Research on an array of fluid dependent machinery such as bearings and rotating equipment, hydraulic systems, gearboxes, and diesel engines, clearly supports that often machine reliability is a function of contamination control.

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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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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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The field of maintenance technology going through a revolution of change. Gone are the t days when a machine had a predictable service life, after which it was replaced, continuing the cycle. Today, machinery and equipment can be maintained to achieve useful operating lives many times that attainable just a few years ago.

In the past, the popular practice of predictive maintenance and condition monitoring to combat rising maintenance costs. In the 1990s, we implement predictive maintenance with greater confidence and precision. These early warnings have proven effective at reducing the magnitude of failure and amount of unscheduled downtime; however, no real progress has been made in reducing frequency. Any maintenance strategy targeting the reduction of failure frequency must address the fundamental causes of failure. Such a strategy of eliminating causes would be “proactive” to failure, not “reactive” to failure.

This approach, known as proactive maintenance, is a promising wave of new maintenance technology. Its fundamental and logical approach seeks to make major inroads into the cost-driven maintenance industry this decade.

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