Asset Management / Life Cycle Cost

Lubrication

Avoid Oil Sampling Pitfalls

Oil analysis is a valuable tool for determining the condition of lubricating oil and the equipment it lubricates. It is best used as a trending process — not a one-time event. When collecting oil samples for routine oil analysis, where and how should you do it?

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Lubrication

Best Practices in Lubrication

Like blood coursing through the veins of living beings, lubrication is what keeps a plant’s capital investments operating smoothly and efficiently. At the same time, when lubrication becomes contaminated or depleted of its sustaining properties, overheating or exhaustion are among the problems that can occur. That leads to downtime and loss of production, and the potential of some hefty maintenance expenses.

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Preventive Maintenance

3 Ways to Improve Motor Health with Vibration Testing

It’s essential that maintenance teams focus on failure modes to match the most suitable tool to the most likely problems. Vibration analysis helps diagnose the most common faults that rotating machines are susceptible to: imbalance, looseness, misalignment, and wear. The compatible trio of owning the right tools, knowing what to test, and sustaining a functional vibration testing program can potentially reduce repair costs and limit unproductive maintenance hours.

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Asset Management

Asset Strategy Management: The Missing Piece in the Asset Management Puzzle

When it comes to asset management, many organizations continue to be hampered by high costs, a high volume of unplanned failures and, ultimately, an unacceptable level of risk. The reason? There’s a piece missing in their asset management puzzle. That piece is called asset strategy management (ASM). It’s a simple, but vital, component of any asset management or reliability focused organization.

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Lubrication

On-Site Fluid Intelligence: A Revolution to Advance Machinery Reliability

Using in-service oil analysis to improve machinery reliability has a long history. The first oil analysis was performed over half a century ago on a locomotive engine. Just as a human blood test provides important information about your health, the information provided by in-service oil analysis about machinery health, especially for a piece of complex machinery with many moving parts, such as a diesel engine, is unmatched by any other technologies on the market.

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Lubrication

7 Steps to Trouble-free Grease Lubrication

The result of their failure can be unexpected downtime, higher maintenance costs or even personnel safety risks. In the worst cases, human lives may be at stake. It is time to stop treating grease as some simple substance that just needs to be pumped into machines at some random frequency and then hoping for the best. Machine greasing must be a systematic and carefully planned process to ensure safe operation of assets and to achieve maximum equipment life.

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Preventive Maintenance

3 Techniques for Optimizing Preventive Maintenance

When Benjamin Franklin wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he was referring to fire safety. But, as you may know from experience, this saying holds true with regard to preventive maintenance (PM). Simply stated, preventive maintenance is an activity performed at a set interval to maintain an asset, regardless of its current condition. It’s a properly planned activity, where materials and parts are on hand and labor is scheduled ahead of time.

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Root Cause

Reliability Tips: The Layers of Root Cause

How often is the phrase “The ROOT Cause of the problem” used at your plant/mill? This phrase is a bit symptomatic of how Root Cause Analysis is thought of. The phrase implies that there is only one “cause” to the problem. Rarely is there a single root cause to any given problem. Usually, there are several reasons; to be sure there are several “technical causes” that interact to create a breakdown/failure.

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Preventive Maintenance

Why Temperature Affects Lubricants

The primary physical characteristics of lubricants that are affected by temperature include viscosity, viscosity index, pour point and the base oil. Let’s deal with these individually.

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