Reasons That Routine Oil Analysis Is Critical To Many Industries
Oil analysis testing is one of many types of critical preventive maintenance that must be carried out in order to ensure that piece of industrial equipment is kept in optimal working order. Across every major industry, from farming to manufacturing, there are numerous types of machines and equipment that cannot function without the oil required to lubricate its moving parts and keep things in motion. In order to ensure that those vital fluids remain at their optimal operating condition or to see what they can tell us about the interior conditions of the machine, they must be tested and analyzed on a regular basis.
The fluids located within each of these machines are generally necessary for normal operations, with many machines needing more than just a single type of fluid. In some machines, they are required to properly lubricate and reduce the friction created by moving parts, which allows helps keep the machine at a safe working temperature. In order machines they are critical to the operation because they are actually what operate the machine, like in a backhoe, which uses compressed oil to transport a hydraulic piston in and out to control the position of the machine’s digging arm.
If any of these important fluids gets contaminated or lose their original properties over time, they will no longer be able to keep the machine running safely, which often leads to some very serious and costly malfunctions. It has been shown through a great deal of research that the majority of equipment failures are the result of none other than contaminated and poorly maintained fluids, so taking care of those fluids is the number one way to take care of the machines they are used in.
One thing about heavy machinery is the fact that there is no amount of maintenance that will prevent them from gradually wearing out over a certain number of years. As moving parts wear out, they are torn down into billions of tiny particles, which will be circulated through the oil until the oil is filled with tiny particles of whatever material the parts are created from. A maintenance crew can learn a lot about what is going wrong in a machine by analyzing the fluids and seeing what sort of contaminants are present and what materials they are made out of, which can then be matched with the parts that are wearing out.
Oil analysis testing permits a machine owner to understand the condition of their machines and fluids and figure out what steps they must take to better maintain their investments. Providing samples of these fluids for routine tests and reports can keep an owner from having to deal with countless expensive downtimes and repairs over the lifetime of their machines and keep the machines running longer.
