Machinery Lubrication magazine published by Noria Corporation
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1480588
40 | September - October 2022 | www . machinerylubrication.com CONDITION MONITORING, LUBRICANT ANALYSIS AND TROUBLESHOOTING Now, anyone that has been through the OA II course or has a good foundation in oil anal- ysis might catch what is going on here, but the folks dealing with the machine had no formal oil analysis training. e thing that folks noticed most frequently was the cavitation on the piston. And yes, that was part of what was wrong, but when we are looking for the root cause of failure, cavitation isn't the answer. is exercise was meant to show people that you can't just focus on one part of the puzzle and get to the solution. ey were still in the detection phase of things and called the problem solved when they saw cavitation. With no water in the samples, I was a bit curious as to what they thought was causing the cavitation or how it was caused inside the cylinder. Air could be the culprit, but this was not likely, in my opinion. I asked them to look a bit more at the oil analysis and determine what had changed. Base number was the first thing that they went to. It isn't inaccurate to say that the base number changed, but still, what was the cause of all of this? Diving more into the oil analysis part of the exercise, we see an increase in three key elements that showed up out of nowhere: boron, sodium and potassium — a few of the key building blocks for many coolants. We had gone over coolants and these building blocks about an hour before, and nobody caught this. ey were too focused on the image of the piston and trying to figure out what the filtergram patch was telling them. ML About the Author Jeremie Edwards is an Asso- ciate Technical Consultant at Noria Corporation. He is one of an elite few certified by the International Council for Machinery Lubrication (ICML) as a Machinery Lubrication Engineer (MLE) and did so in order to become the best advisor for clients when it comes to their continuing education needs. Before joining Noria, Jeremie served six years in the U.S. Army as a parachute rigger and was deployed in Afghanistan, Uzbeki- stan, Turkey and Germany. Contact Jeremie at jedwards@noria.com NEW OIL USED JUNE USED JULY USED AUG Viscosity (100°C) 12 11.8 11.5 16 BN 11 9 8 3 Sodium N/A 0 0 60 Boron N/A 0 0 15 Potassium N/A 0 0 20 Copper N/A 3 2 19 Lead N/A 5 4 9 Water N/A Neg. Neg. Neg. Blotter N/A - - Pasty center A small history of the oil analysis