Hey,
Does anyone knows any good books or magazine that could help us learning the benefit of ferrography and what these analysis reports mean? If you know anything about that stuff, it would be great to hear from you.
Thanks

Check out Predict

Ferrography can be considered a two-part process. Direct read ferrography (trending tool/instrument that yields wear particle concentration) and analytical ferrography (microscopic analysis/evaluation/judgement).

I am curious if you are considering performing these tests at your site or adding these tests to your test slate for samples going to an offsite lab. Or, perhaps you are just curious. The financial costs to obtain the ferrography equipment, supplies, and necessary training can be a large committment, depending on your situation.

I would add that there are other tests available that might be more meaningful or run in conjunction with DR ferrography that would benefit machine evaluation. As always, all tests have limitations.

My opinion, DR ferrography is great for gearboxes and like components. I might offer some other ideas if you are primarily looking at systems such as turbines and the like where you would not "expect" much ferrous debris.

Contact me via email, if interested.

sjmitchell@aep.com

BTW: I'm an analyst at a power generation facility, not a salesman.

Thanks Stevis and mr. Hughes,
We are a big underground mining industry and we are not interested in doing these test on site. We send our sample away for analysis. We have people with pretty good knowledge in other kind of oil and grease analysis but nobody have been trained on ferrography yet. We have been recommended to send our underground ventilation fan's grease for ferrography, we got the results but we don't really know what it means.
We got a report from the analysis company but we are interested to know on what they base these recommendations.
What is a bad number for Normal wear, Severe wear, etc?? What is the signification of these number, are they PPM or??
Thanks

Take a look at ASTM D 6224, primarily under section 8.21, 8.22, and 8.23 for more background information.

It talks about particle counting, wear particle concentration, and wear debris analysis.

There is a wealth of other information throughout the document, if you are inclined.

We don't sample grease at our plant.
Check out this page including the pdf
http://www.herguth.com/grease.htm

They point out that quantitative measures of wear (icp concentration, DRF) are limited in grease due to the incomplete mixing, lack of representative sample etc. Therefore they consider analytical ferrography ideal for assessing wear mechanisms and severity is grease bearings due to it's qualitative nature.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: electricpete,

Thanks electricpete, good information