Haris: Hello Martin, how are you?
Martin: Hey Haris, I’m good, thanks. How about you?
Haris: Excellent! New Monday, new ice cream, new coffee, and new lubrication topic.
Martin: Oh, totally, yeah!
Haris: This one is sad, this one is tragic, and I always like what they say in court that you to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and I would like to refer to the whole truth, right now, when we speak about grease especially everybody and all the trainings are saying that there are three elements in the grease and… what?
Martin: Me too… I say that!
Haris: So, there are officially three elements in grease, and they are base oil, thickener, and additives, while, in reality, there are actually four, but nobody likes the fourth one and that’s contamination, and that reality, it’s there.
We can avoid mentioning this as much as we want but it is still there, and it has a huge, enormous impact to everything. So, I would like to think about that today about this what everybody puts under the carpet because this like in medicine the hygiene is half of your health system. So, let’s talk about contamination: who are the enemies? How many of them? How do they look like and what do they do?
Martin: Ok, well, you could then say that oil has three elements: the oil (the base oil), the additives, and the contaminants. And, you know, last week, “funnel-y” enough, we had the example of the funnel and it’s a traditional way of transferring oil in the machine, most people don’t give it a second thought, but let’s just take a look at it, it’s been lying on the bench gathering dust. There will be dust down on the inside and I could put a cloth in there and give it a wipe up and leave a few fibres there, I could clean the end, maybe, but look at these convolutions designed to allow me to get it in at any angle type of thing but those are a trap, they’re going to trap particulates and they are going to trap water droplets because I’ve even seen this when I’ve been doing audits on site. When I’m there and the guys thinking: ‘this man’s watching me, I better do the job right’ and I’ve watched him go to a tap with this Funnel and rinse it out with water and, you know, you’ve probably seen this in the Middle East, in places like that, where water bottles are free issued to avoid dehydration and, of course, the water bottle gets used as a funnel, we cut the end off, of course, there are still a few drops of water in that bottle. But, you know, you asked about it, you mentioned it: the enemy. I have a bit of a standing joke because I like to talk about the hidden enemy and if I may borrow such a phrase from one of the previous American presidents, the hidden enemy and I call it hidden because, you know, when we’re talking about particles, the ones that do the most damage are the ones we can’t physically see. They are well below 40 microns in size and your eyes, even my young eyes, aren’t able to see a particle bigger than 40 micron and, clearly it would help if the particle was in a complete contrast in colour to the background, but, sadly, a lot of our contaminant particles are in a very similar colour to the oil, so they become camouflaged and even if we could see them, it would be difficult. So, you know, we are talking about the hidden enemy, so, when you say to somebody look, you know, this is the particle count for your oil on your machine and it’s not good, they look at you as if to say I don’t see any particles in the oil, my machine is still running, what’s the problem? You know and they hold a can of new oil and they look at it and it’s clear and bright and they can’t see the particles, so they think: new oil is clean oil. But, we know, new oil is definitely not clean oil, and, in fact, new oil should be filtered to the correct level. Hence, in the background behind you, I’m delighted to see the filtration units for filtering those drums of oil, to ensure that they are brought to a level that is at least four times cleaner than the target of clearness of the machine, which really, you know, with contamination one of our problems is: your machinery can run with contamination and it can run happily with contamination, but it’ll only do that for a period of time. If we were to remove that contamination it would run much more happily for much much longer, you know, we’re talking life extensions at three to four times minimum when we clean up or act.
Haris: And that’s the target!
Martin: Yeah! And this is the whole thing it’s a proactive type of target with contamination, it’s a bit like, you know, obviously for some of us that have gone through lockdown, we are kind of balloon slightly with all the snacking we’re doing from the home office in the kitchen then.
Haris: Just from here up, not down.
Martin: Exactly! Anyway, getting back to the point, we can be obese, we can be overweight, we’re not dropping dead, but there are chances we will at an earlier age if we don’t deal with the issue. So, we set a target for our body weight, for our health reasons and we try to stay within that target. We don’t have to, but it’s a good thing to do, it’s proactive and, you know, this is one of the sad realities I’ve seen with so many lubrication programs, they might be doing oil analysis, the laboratory might do particle counting for them, they will definitely try to do some moisture detection because everybody perceives moisture to be the most destructive contaminant when, in fact, that’s the second most destructive contaminant. But the problem is that, you know, the actual oil analysis results are really reflecting what you’re doing on site. It’s the same way that when I stand on the bathroom scales it reflects what I’ve been doing in the kitchen and if I want to see improvements in those results, I’ve got to change what I do and that’s what we’ve got to say about contamination, we’ve got to change what we do onsite. We’ve got to clean up and change what we do and stop thinking about what we used to do and think about what we need to do and then we’ll start to see improvements in our oil analysis results across the board.
Haris: The silent killer is a problem because it’s painless, it doesn’t happen overnight, it’s not like an explosion, it just a slow decay, so nobody actually reacts. I’ve seen different cases, I’ve seen cases when the bearing was completely destroyed after 200 operating hours. That’s nice because you see the problem immediately, it sounds quite alarming, it sounds like a problem so somebody will do something about it. But, if you lose 30% of life of all of your assets, well that’s gonna happened in few years and nobody actually feels it and that’s the problem, and that’s why we are pushing it under the carpet very often and that is exactly what we see.
So, I remember you example about the size of the aspirin on a barrel of oil, that’s how much contamination is needed to destroy that barrel of oil.
Martin: Yeah, if you take a drum of oil like the one behind you, it’s only 100ml of water getting into that drum to take it to a point that can reduce the bearing life by as much as 60%. Because 500 parts per million or 0.05% by volume of water in your oil is enough to take up to 60% of the life of the bearing. Similarly, when we start looking at the particles, you know, clearly every drum that arrives on site, typically, the cleanliness of a drum of new oil, in fact, in reality, the number of particles in a drum of oil is equivalent to an aspirin tablet. And, you and I are married, we know how an aspirin tablet looks like, right? So, you know, most guys would know what an aspirin tablet looks like, that’s how many particles we typically see: 200mg. typically, in terms of the mass on the particulate in that drum of new oil. Which is way too dirty for most hydraulic systems.
Haris: I agree and that’s definitely a problem and I’m so happy we discussed it a little bit and maybe to raise awareness a little bit more… be careful about this silent enemy because it’s there, it’s reality, it’s killing us nicely and slowly continuously.
Martin, thank you very much for this Monday and this section, we hope to see you next Monday!
Martin: Good, excellent! Thank you again, Haris.
