We currently have a Joy Turbo compressor in our Compressor plant down for an overhaul. The service rep has noted that there is a lot of varnish on the gearing, bearings etc. We have noticed this on the oil cooler tubes over the years. These types of compressors use a (shell)Turbo 46 mineral oil We have not changed the oil on a pm w/o as obviously we rely on lube analysis to tell us when to do this. It looks like Utilities people has changed the (shell)Turbo 46 mineral oil to Royal Purple 46 on some of the Joy compressors, in an effort to beat the varnishing problem. The Royal Purple is used on lot's of equipment in the boilerhouse.The service reps are telling us never to use the Royal Purple and are telling us we would never have the varnishing problems if we did a straight change out of the (shell) Turbo 46 mineral oil, once per year.


#2- does anyone have a past use history on Royal Purple? We hear it is a GREAT Product But we are also hearing recommendations from various sources which contradicts this message.

Any infomation, help on this would be appreciated. THANKS!

No opinion on using Royal Purple
However varnish with Turbine oils has become quite common in the past few years
Go to page 2 of Oil Analysis and to see one discussion on varnish
Under Industrial Lubrication several of the pages have discussions on varnish and how to monitor for it/remove it through filtration
I used the edit function of my tool bar at the top of the page to search for the word "varnish" to find the discussions.
Google "varnish turbine oil" and you will get a large number of hits

Thanks for the Reply Bob! Appreciate it.