Avoiding Catastrophic Failures: Preventive Maintenance with High-Quality Industrial Lubricants

Industrial facilities handle extreme pressures, temperatures, speeds, and more. To withstand such demanding conditions over years of continual operation, equipment must be meticulously maintained. Preventive maintenance is essential for avoiding catastrophic failures that jeopardize safety, disrupt production, and inflict major costs. High-performance industrial lubricants play a pivotal role in effective preventive maintenance programs.

The role played by lubricants

Lubricants minimize wear on components through proper viscosity, friction reduction, and cooling. This requires using lubricants formulated to handle equipment-specific loads, speeds, and operating environments. Off-the-shelf lubricants often fall short of meeting OEM specifications. Partnering with a qualified lubricant supplier provides access to advanced fluids engineered for maximum equipment protection.

Suppliers offer lubricant testing to identify optimal chemistries. They also provide used oil analysis to detect lubricant breakdown and emerging equipment issues. Armed with data-driven lubricant insights, facilities can implement a predictive maintenance program cantered on identifying and addressing problems early. This proactive approach prevents minor issues from escalating into catastrophic failures.

Important facts that facilities should be mindful of

Facilities must adhere to vigilant contamination control when handling, storing, and applying lubricants. Particulate contaminants in lubricants cause significant wear. Suppliers offer best practices for preventing contamination from environmental ingress, handling procedures, storage tanks, transfer containers, and more. Strict cleanliness standards are essential for lubrication excellence. Proactive maintenance steps enabled by high-performance lubricants include below.

·         Oil Changes: Used oil analysis determines optimal change intervals based on actual lubricant condition rather than arbitrary timeframes. This maximizes value from lubricants. Scheduled change-outs also remove contaminants and replenish additives.

·         Filter Changes: Particulate filters safeguard equipment from contaminant damage. Change intervals should align with used oil analysis results and OEM guidelines.

·         Lubrication Routes: Regular re-lubrication of components is vital. Optimization provides proper volumes and frequencies while avoiding over- or under-lubrication.

·         Inspections: Visual inspections identify leaks requiring repair. Ultrasound and vibration analysis detect early mechanical issues. Thermography spots abnormal heat generation. These issues can be addressed before causing failure.

·         Alignments: Precision alignment of mating parts minimizes abnormal wear from friction. Couplings and shafts are common alignment focal points.

·         Balancing: Proper balancing reduces vibration forces that stress equipment. Balancing should occur after cleaning or replacing rotating parts.

·         Fastener Torquing: Torque audits ensure proper tightness of critical fasteners like turbine bolts. Loose fasteners can have catastrophic consequences.

·         Surface Condition: Monitoring surface wear, pits, and cracks provides early warning of component demise. Scanning techniques include visual, ultrasonic, eddy current, and more.

The goal of preventive maintenance is preserving equipment health through the full lifecycle. This requires a holistic plan encompassing lubricant selection, contamination control, testing and analysis, equipment inspections, proactive repairs, overhauls and more. Manufacturers should tap into lubricant suppliers’ tribology expertise when designing PM programs.

Getting the management support, you want

Preventing catastrophic failures also requires management support. Maintenance teams need sufficient resources and latitude to proactively address issues. The common tendency to fix failures reactively must give way to prevention. High-quality lubricants are an essential pillar of preventive maintenance. Key enablers include below.

·         Advanced base oils with higher purity, stability, and viscosity indexes

·         Additive chemistries that minimize wear, rust, oxidation, deposits

·         Synthetic formulations that enable extended drain intervals

·         Superior demulsibility and water separation

·         Effective foam suppression and air release

·         Thermal and oxidative stability at extreme temperatures

·         Resistance to acidic byproducts of combustion

For lubricant suppliers, promoting the benefits of high-performance industrial lubricants requires nuanced marketing messaging. Suppliers should emphasize how specialty lubricants enable greater asset utilization, reliability and longevity when used as part of comprehensive preventive maintenance programs.

Important roles that different industries have to deal with

Messaging should focus on quantified business outcomes beyond just product performance claims. Manufacturers care most about operational continuity, cost avoidance and safety. Suppliers must tie lubricant quality to how it supports those key objectives. For example, highlighting how many hours of unexpected downtime or maintenance expense can be avoided by using premium lubricants.

Quantified value propositions resonate stronger than vague promises of lubricant superiority. Marketing materials should showcase examples of specific facilities where improved lubricants reduced failures by XX%, extended time between repairs by YY hours, or generated ZZ dollars in documented savings. Testimonials from maintenance leaders attributing transformative improvements to high-performance lubricants make the benefits tangible.

Tradeshow displays should mimic equipment environments to vividly showcase lubricant performance under harsh operating conditions. Dynamic videos of lubricants enduring extreme pressures and temperatures also effectively convey robustness. Tangibly demonstrating how specialty lubricants withstand punishing forces that would destroy off-the-shelf products stimulates interest.

Role that suppliers have to play

Suppliers should invite key customer prospects to visit research and manufacturing facilities. Seeing lubricant innovation first-hand forges trust and confidence. The ability to discuss fluid chemistries with on-site R&D engineers also demonstrates technical expertise. After experiencing the care and precision behind creating advanced lubricants, manufacturers gain confidence in product quality.

Of course, modifying marketing approaches and materials requires thoughtful coordination between sales, marketing, and technical teams. Salespeople must guide marketers towards impactful messaging grounded in customer pain points and technical realities. With aligned outreach, suppliers can maximize results from marketing spend while delivering a unified brand experience.

But even the savviest marketing cannot substitute for a cohesive customer-centric corporate culture. Preventive maintenance represents an ongoing partnership between lubricant suppliers and manufacturers. Improving asset reliability requires mutual commitment to lubrication excellence over the long term. Both parties must invest time, effort, and resources to continuously enhance programs and processes.

Role played by safety teams

Sales teams play a crucial role by identifying improvement opportunities proactively, spearheading needed changes collaboratively with customers, and building relationships where manufacturers view the supplier as an invaluable partner. Customer intimacy cannot be faked or manufactured. It requires a consultative mindset focused on mutual value.

With increasingly complex and expensive equipment, manufacturers have tremendous incentive to invest in asset longevity and operational continuity. Effective preventive maintenance cantered on high-performance lubricants delivers substantial returns over time as reliability improves and aging assets operate like new. Partnering with specialty lubricant suppliers committed to lubrication excellence provides access to the products and expertise necessary to make proactive reliability a reality. By seizing this opportunity, manufacturers can protect critical assets to meet rising production demands safely and profitably.

Final words

Partnering with an expert lubricant supplier unlocks access to top-tier fluids and complementary services like training, contamination control, and used oil analysis. Investments in preventive maintenance support sustainable, reliable, and safe facility operation. The alternative – equipment failures inflicting avoidable costs, downtime, and safety risks – is far too great a gamble. By leveraging high-performance lubricants as part of robust PM programs, manufacturers protect their most critical assets.