Learn oil/fluid lab analysis & condition monitoring

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Learn Oil Analysis

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Secrets of OCM

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Latest & Popular Articles

See the latest and most popular articles on oil analysis that have been posted to find out more about how oil analysis works and the benefits it could be doing for you.

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This article will answer the following questions:

How dirty is my lube oil and how do I check my lubrcating oil cleanliness?

What are ISO 4406 and NAS SAE 4059 particle counts?

Everyone loves an underdog, but this is one example where you don't want them to win.

Dirt particles smaller than can be seen with the naked eye may appear small when compared to towering machinery. However dirt particles are one of the number one causes of premature machinery failures. Although the part...

David vs Goliath. Why you want Goliath to win? How dirt can destroy your machinery and oil sampling can detect this early to prevent a failure.

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This article will answer the following questions:

How to reduce lube oils costs and cheaper lubricant bills?

How to extend oil drain change intervals?
How to effectively plan cheaper oil changes?

If it costs you £50k to change your oil you are naturally going to be cautious about doing so without needing to. So traditional approaches of changing your oil E.g. every 3 years don’t really seem to add up if your oil could go for 4 years, whilst the cost of the machinery failure ...

Why partial oil changes don't make financial sense.

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Sliding wear is an important failure mechanism of machinery. All machinery wears, but when it occurs too much this is termed sliding wear. This article will give you a brief introduction to what happens when the lubricant film thickness is overwhelmed.

Sliding wear is typically seen with striations, brush like marks across the surface of the wear particles. In the above you can see the grain of the sliding wear goes diagonally from top left to bottom right

To explain what is abnormal wear...

What happens when your oil stops being slippy enough?

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The below list is a general guide for additive concentrations in lubricating oils. This list is not definitive and with the recent emergence of Nano-technology and ashless additives that are not metal based the variation between different additive packages formulations will change greatly. The best way to confirm the additive element concentration for your lubricating oil is to send an unused sample for reference to the lab, or contact your lubricant supplier for details. Additive concentrations...

Oil additives - functions & typical concentrations. What do calcium, phosphorus, zinc, molybdenum and oil additives do in your lube oil?

PQ Learn used oil analysis sample testing, lubrication reliability maintenance, predictive lab diagnostics to reduce costs & boost profits.

PQ – this is a dimension absent value indicating the amount of ferrous (i.e. Iron, Steel, Cobalt or Nickel - magnetic) material in the sample. Standard Iron results are performed by ICP (Inductively coupled plasma) and measures particles ideally less than 5 to 10µm. By comparison the width of a human hair is 80µm. Therefore large ferrous particles that can be seen by eye will be underestimated by ICP. Hence the PQ method detects small and large particles and the test can be used with iron to...

PQ - Measuring abnormal sized ferrous / iron wear particles in lube oils

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I recently had a long weekend in the south of England and did a little sight seeing getting the most out of my national trust and English heritage passes. Whilst there, I visited stone henge, one of the UK's and potentially the world's most recognisable ancient monuments. Listening to the audio tour, the guide was explaining about the numerous restoration projects that had taken place on the site and one peaked my interest.

In 1900 one of the larger trilithons (the two parallel stones with on...

Can you make your lube oil last 5000 years?

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You might find it quite surprising but all 4 of these fatigue wear pictures ranging from 0.5mm (500 micron) to 3mm in size examples came from a single grease sample. The iron value was 2508ppm by standard ASTM D5185 ICP and by the more precise LubeWear acid digestion analysis 82305ppm which is the highest amount of wear I have ever seen in a lubricant sample in my career.

It came from a failed bearing in the rail sector and it shows how important monitoring your bearing health with regular grea...

Is your machinery feeling fatigued?

Why Oil Analysis Matters?

Oil Analysis is used by people just like you all over the world to reduce machinery downtime and improve equipment reliability. A small sample of oil from your machinery can provide as much information as a full machine strip down at a fraction of the cost and has been a proven technology for over 60 years to reduce forced shutdowns and failure repair costs. Want to understand how oil and grease analysis works and how it applies to you then watch this short video below.

How Much Can Oil Analysis Save Me?

Oil analysis is a brilliant tool that can save you money each time you sample. The returns on investment vary depending on your machinery type, so feel free to use our sister sites cost saving calculator at the bottom of their FAQ Page.

Read the Book

By registering for free to our quarterly newsletter and logging in you can read the industry leading textbook series on oil analysis “Learn Oil Analysis”

Ask a question

Ask a question on oil analysis directly to the site author. This can also include requests on how and with whom to start fluid sampling. You can also contact the author on linkedin.

See our Training Courses

Register for free and get access to some of our great short oil analysis training training courses. Content is updated regularly and includes explanation of tests, sources of wear, how to take a sample and the benefits of oil Sampling. You can also book a dedicated training day for you and your team too or enquire about our deluxe online training programmes.

Welcome to Learn Oil Analysis

Training Videos

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viscosity preview Learn used oil analysis sample testing, lubrication reliability maintenance, predictive lab diagnostics to reduce costs & boost profits.

PQ preview Learn used oil analysis sample testing, lubrication reliability maintenance, predictive lab diagnostics to reduce costs & boost profits.

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Get your oil tested

If you have never had your oil tested before then what are you waiting for and get in contact with a lab today. There are many reputable labs all across the world that offer excellent oil analysis services you can use including our sister lab – Oil Analysis Laboratories, which is the only lab in the world to offer the LubeWear test. LubeWear identifies abnormal wear far earlier than traditional wear metal analysis techniques meaning you can catch faults earlier to keep your machine reliability at its highest. A brief video explanation of the rest can be viewed below.