The Lubricant That Doesn’t Lubricate The fastest-growing fluid market for companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, FUCHS, Castrol, and Lubrizol has nothing to do with turbines, hydraulic presses, or gearboxes. It’s a stainless steel tank full of servers submerged in...
Condition monitoring is sometimes portrayed in industry messaging as being effectively limited to vibration analysis and ultrasound. Such claims, including those recently advanced by emerging vendors in the sensing technology space, reflect a broader pattern of...
Over the years, I have come across instances where issues have arisen, such as the filters blinding prematurely. With testing, this has ultimately been identified as leaving the tank open in a paper mill, and an investigation of the elements highlighted this, along...
Temperature is a dominant factor influencing lubricant degradation, machine reliability, and overall asset performance. The widely accepted heuristic that lubricant life is reduced by half for every 10 °C increase in temperature is rooted in the Arrhenius equation,...
Crude oil prices have fluctuated significantly over the past 12 months, with a recent sharp increase in 2026 due to the crisis in the Middle East, while global lubricating oil prices remain relatively stable and do not directly track crude oil volatility. An analysis...
Moving Beyond Detection to Deliver Reliability For maintenance managers and reliability professionals, identifying a problem is only the beginning. The real objective is preventing it from happening again. In demanding industries with processing and manufacturing...
Several years ago, I published an article titled, “How to Get Started with Onsite Oil Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide”. In that article, I outline 7 steps to developing a successful onsite program: Developing an equipment criticality profile Determining sampling...
Oils are composed of base oils and additives. Typically, additives are sacrificial; they deplete first before the base oil is affected. As such, by trending their quantities over time, we can gain insight into a few of the conditions to which the oil is subjected. By...
Oil analysis is widely recognized as one of the most potent tools in precision lubrication and reliability engineering. Yet, despite decades of industry experience, many organizations unknowingly undermine their effectiveness before the first sample is even taken. A...
The reliability and availability of industrial assets are critical factors for the competitiveness of modern organizations. In this context, maintenance has evolved from a predominantly corrective model to preventive, predictive, and more recently, proactive...
