Machinery Lubrication magazine published by Noria Corporation
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/825468
medical field. In Seattle during the 1970s, residents used to brag that it was the safest city in which to have a heart attack. Thanks to a program called Medic One, someone having a heart attack could expect to be in treatment within 15 minutes or less. The program indeed saved many lives. The problem was that it was reactive in nature. Doctors intervened only after someone had suffered a heart attack. Since then, of course, the medical community has embraced the wisdom of taking preventive measures to reduce the risk of heart attacks in the first place. We now know to take precautionary steps such as exercising, eating right, not smoking, etc. Predictive Maintenance: A Reactive Approach In many ways, plant maintenance today is where medicine was in the 1970s. The tools are more advanced than ever, but they reflect a reactive mindset. Consider where advertising dollars have gone. For the past two decades, the focus in maintenance magazines, websites and trade shows has increasingly shifted from maintenance management solutions, such as computer- ized maintenance management systems (CMMS), to predictive maintenance and condition monitoring products. Make no mistake, tools like vibration analysis, infrared thermography and other technologies play a vital role in diagnosing problems early to reduce the impact of downtime. Yet, much like Seattle's Medic One, they are truly useful only after the signs of failure have begun to appear. They are fundamentally reactive in nature. With so much emphasis on the efforts to detect failure, it begs the question: What about preventing machine failure from occurring to begin with? Addressing Machine Failure at the Source To eliminate bearing failure, you must first identify the cause. On that score, most experts are already in agreement, and have been for decades, that poor or inade- quate lubrication is the primary cause of industrial equipment wear and failure. In 1995, an assessment provided during an engineering conference placed the figure at 54 percent. In 2014, Ken Bannister's "State of the Lubrication Nation" revised the percentage to 70 percent. Bannister further calculated U.S. losses from lubrication- related issues to be an eye-opening $1 trillion annually. Estimates vary, but it's clear that the number of lube-related machine failures is far too high. There are many reasons why lubrication problems are so persistent. A look at a few key statistics tells part of the story: Only 12 percent of those assigned lubrication duties are certified to do so. Seventy-nine percent of companies do not have a professionally audited lubrication program. Sixty-one percent of companies do not track lubrica- tion-related failures. Fifty-seven percent do not perform system checks on automated lubricant-delivery systems. Ninety-one percent do not have lubricant requirement sheets for bearings. The Problem and the Answer Increasingly, reliability engineers are beginning to recognize the role that inade- quate lubrication plays in unplanned downtime and equipment failure. In an online survey by Machinery Lubrication, nearly 80 percent of reliability engineers indicated they experience lubricant starva- tion. In a live poll during a recent online maintenance conference, more than 85 percent of respondents made a correla- tion between lubrication issues and the level of reactive maintenance. Lubrication shortcomings result in repeated equipment failures, production losses, subpar technician productivity, excessive energy usage, increased lube consumption, negative environmental impacts and a state of perpetual catching up. Coming to Terms with Lubrication's Complexity While a growing number of reliability engineers understand the importance of proper lubrication in a plant's efficiency, awareness at the management level is often lacking. In many organizations, manage- ment believes lubrication is just like any other maintenance task. However, as reli- ability engineers and lube technicians have known for years, lubrication is a highly specialized discipline. In fact, it is so complex that the International Council for Machinery Lubrication (ICML) offers numerous certifications for it. To get an idea of the many intricacies that lubrication entails, consider all the factors just to determine lube require- ments. This generally involves five core data elements: components, lubricants, task types, procedures and frequencies. It could take seven different combinations of these elements to define lube requirements for a single conveyor and anywhere from 100-200 combinations across a plant. In addition, it is not unusual for indus- trial plants to have many thousands of lube 8 | May - June 2017 | www.machinerylubrication.com COVER STORY