What should you do when a lubricant doesn’t get a clean bill of health?

More specifically, what must be done with the machine that contained a degraded or contaminated lubricant after the oil drain? Is a flush required?

If the answer is yes, there are a few other questions that follow, such as:

• What was the root cause that led to a need to flush? Who is to blame?
• How urgent is the need to flush? Can’t we wait?
• What are the risks of not flushing? What is the worst that can happen?
• Are there negative side effects to performing a flush? What dark cloud is hidden beneath the silver lining?
• What is the best way to perform the flush to reduce cost, risks and business interruption?

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The products of lubricant degradation are called sludge and varnish. These products start in the dissolved form and accumulate until the lubricant reaches its capacity, referred to as the saturating point, forcing any excess to convert into insoluble degradation products. In certain instances, deposits form on machine surfaces at the exact location where the oil has degraded. In other cases, the oil degrades in one location but, the insoluble degradation products are carried elsewhere by the moving fluid forming deposits on surfaces.

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If you thought oil analysis was only about monitoring oil properties, you’re in for a big surprise. It’s a fundamental premise that we don’t analyze the oil merely to generate data, but rather we are surveying for answers to machine reliability questions. Many of the answers are imbedded in the body of in-service lubricants, but many others are found in remnants of degraded lubricant and sloughed-off debris. These discarded impurities can be far more revealing to machine reliability than what remains oil-borne.

Too often I’ve seen lab data show an oil to be relatively clean when, at the same time, filters were plugging prematurely and there was heavy tank bottom sediment. For the most part, low-viscosity industrial lubricants like turbine oils have limited impurity-holding capacity. This simply means that these fluids are quick to release solid and liquid impurities to machine surfaces, filters, separators and system quiescence zones.

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