Which instruments do yo suggest for an Oil Analysis Lab?
The customers are unknown, may be powerplants or etc.
I thought about an AES, FTIR and vicometer.
Please provide rough cost of your suggestion. (I know prices may be very different for similar products from different companies, but please quote cost roughly or a range)

It depends on the oil being sampled and on the volume of oil to be tested. Also depends on how complete a setup you want.

Please note I am working prices backwards from my currency into dollars and so might be way out on the figures.

Spectrometer (or ICP) for wear metal count - $100 000. (we picked up a second hand unused Spectroil JR as a backup machine for $5 000). Note ICP running costs are generally higher, but the ICP is cheaper than Spectroil M for a large amount of samples.

Viscometer - huge selection to choose from, consider the Omnitek S flow >$17 000 (does V100 & v40).

FTIR - not sure of the cost. Digilab is one brand. Think the cost is about $25 000 but could be wrong.

Note that you might want to skip the FTIR and rather go with a soot meter(<$2000), TAN and TBN titrator(<$2000), and Karl Fischer(<$2000) for water. This basically covers the major FTIR bands (except for Oxidation, Glycol(which never works on FTIR) and nitration). Besides a large number of the FTIR readings are geared towards engine oil which might not be what you want.

Software to collate and present data - anything from $5000 to $25 000.

PQ -to measure all metal content above 8µ in size (<$4000). (Not necessarily needed).

Flashpoint tester (for engine oils) - <$3000.

Hotplate - for crackle test <$500.

Determining what type of oil you are going to be testing is the single most important objective. You can spend 100's of 1000's of dollars on equipment but you may never get a return on the initial purchase cost.
And what do you want to test for?
A basic lab for hydraulic oil would be fine with an APC, viscometer, moisture meter (pref karl fischer if it is cost effective) and perhaps PQ. But you need to know what the limitations of the equipment you buy are. This type of setup would only be good for identifying problems but not necessarily what the actual problem is.
Are you looking at setting up a commercial lab or private? I'm assuming commercial due to the fact that the customers are unknown.
The cost really depends on the quality that you need and the quantity you are going to put through. For example, viscometers can be anywhere between $AU3000 and $AU50,000 with greatly varying degrees of quaility assembly and components.
You really need to do some market research first to make sure the money you invest is going to give you a good return. There's no point in getting an optical particle counter if you are primarily testing engine oils...

hi

i'm a new member in this forum so i could not post anew subject

my question < does any one knows instrument to make recycle for used xylene , and who know power pint safety program ralated to oil lab technican