Maintenance Technology July 2017 - 35

LUBRICATION STRATEGIES

With plant equipment
and processes growing
more sophisticated and
demanding by the day, so
must everything that keeps
them up and running,
including approaches to
machinery lubrication.
Integrated, proactivemaintenance technologies
and strategies are key
for fast-paced industrial
operations that want
to be competitive, and
are easily justified in
economic terms.

Move from Time- to

Condition-Based
Lubrication

Ken Bannister
MEch Eng (UK)
CMRP, MLE
Contributing Editor

Increasingly sophisticated machines and operations require more than legacy PM approaches.
THE TERM "TIMEBASED MAINTENANCE" is well
understood in industrial operations. The premise is simple.
A regular maintenance/lubrication event is scheduled on the
basis of a calendar anniversary, i.e., weekly, monthly, quarterly,
yearly, or other interval, or on a machine's run-time clock,
i.e., 100, 250, 1,000 hr., or some other specified number of
hours. Foundational to legacy preventive-maintenance (PM)
programs, this type of event scheduling has served industry
well for decades.
Plant equipment systems and processes, however, are
becoming more complex and demanding by the day. In turn,
they are requiring increasingly sophisticated maintenance
approaches. Going forward, if they haven't already done so,
sites will need to adapt to an integrated, proactive-maintenance
approach that maximizes machine availability and reliability.
The economic justification is simple.
In a legacy time-based event, a forced machine downtime
is usually scheduled to perform maintenance or lubrication,
e.g., oil change. Older equipment designs usually dictate that
a machine must be shut down and locked out to determine its
JULY 2017

status and conduct scheduled activities in a safe manner. This
method obviously has an impact on an operation's throughput
capability.
Given today's fast-paced operating environments, a forced
two-hour downtime to change oil on a calendar schedule-
whether it needs to be changed or not-is no longer acceptable. We still need to change oil, but we need to treat that oil as
we would any asset and maintain it over an extended lifecycle.
That means changing it only when conditions warrant change.
This type of monitoring strategy reduces machine intervention
and increases production throughput, as well as reduces costs
related to the purchasing, handling, and disposal of lubricants
at a site. It also fits perfectly in any corporate asset lifecycle or
sustainability initiative.
Moving from a time-based to a condition-based lubrication program is an ideal change-management vehicle for
transforming and improving an operation's state of lubrication.
Successful design and implementation of a condition-based
lubrication program can manifest itself in different forms,
depending on a plant's industry sector and current state of
MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM | 35

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology July 2017