By Bryan Debshaw, POLARIS Laboratories® Most maintenance and reliability programs today recognize the value of oil analysis for rotating equipment. From gearboxes and hydraulics to turbines and compressors, fluid analysis provides critical insight into asset...
By Bob Kendall When most people think about lubrication reliability, they picture what happens inside the machine. Bearings. Hydraulic systems. Gears. Pumps. Injectors. Oil analysis reports. But in reality, many lubrication failures begin long before the lubricant...
Upcoming training Machinery Lubrication Level I — Pewaukee, WI Four days of intensive training on industrial lubrication best practices — lubricant selection, storage, filtration, and application. Built for those pursuing MLT I / MLA I certification. July 13 – 16,...
Upcoming training Machinery Lubrication Level I — Pewaukee, WI Four days of intensive training on industrial lubrication best practices — lubricant selection, storage, filtration, and application. Built for those pursuing MLT I / MLA I certification. July 13 – 16,...
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...
Sometimes we can spend hours poring over technical data sheets, comparing oil performances, and finally selecting the “right” oil which aligns with the needs of our equipment. Then, within 2 months, the oil degrades, our machines shut down, and we have a bunch of...
What's the Right Number of Lubricants for Your Plant? Over the years, I have been to sites with either too many or too few lubricant types. Both scenarios are potentially costly. On the one hand, too many types of lubricant are costly in terms of purchase price and...
Compressors are integral to many of our operations. They are used to compress gas, increasing its pressure, and to power tools. They can also be used as vacuum pumps or blowers, but each application is different. As such, they require various types of lubrication,...
When the lube room resembles a crime scene - chaotic storage, unlabeled containers, questionable handling tools, inconsistent transfer practices - it becomes a hidden driver of accelerated wear, additive depletion, ingress-driven contamination, and component life...
