PREDICT OIL USEFUL LIFE WITH REAL-TIME DATA

Oil is the life of any hydraulic or lubrication system.

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When I was working in a forging plant, we had some very large hydraulic systems. When the system went down for any reason, we lost a minimum of $10,000 per hour in production. When a large hydraulic system's oil goes bad, it can easily take eight hours to change out or flush. Ask yourself, can your company afford to lose $ 80,000 in production for a single incident?

Oil is the life of any hydraulic or lubrication system. When it is fresh and healthy, the system operates as intended. As it ages and begins losing its properties, issues within the system occur to the point where your system can fail.

A common practice for a hydraulic system is to take an oil sample monthly or even quarterly. This sample is then sent off to be analyzed. The analysis takes a few days to a week to get back, and it requires a highly skilled person to read the analysis and determine if there is an issue. Trending an issue might take months; all the while, the system is losing performance.

In this paper, we will discuss what type of data should be collected, why that data is important,how the data should be collected, what should be done with the collected data, how to analyze this data, and how to apply the analysis to your system.

What Should Be Collected

There are numerous factors to consider when trying to determine what is affecting a system's fluid, including:

• The ambient temperature

• The atmosphere the system is operating in

• How often the system turns over in the tank

• The pressure the system is operating at

All these outside influences affect the fluid.