Percentage of Machinery Failure Due To Inccorect Lubrication

search Noria's site. You may get lucky.

Send me your email address and i can send you a few articles I have collected over the years.

deanm@autolube.ca

From one study on motors it was stated that 83% of motors fail due to bearing failures and most of those failures are due to improper lubrication.
Greasing of bearings is greatly misunderstood both in application and types of grease. People that attend my training sessions are amazed at how simple greasing can be but it took me many years to gain the expertise to make it simple.
Oil lubrication can be made much simpler if you start with a good oil analysis program. First select a lab that uses good analysis techniques and produces a complete report with technical back up. Having a company that offers solutions to your oil problems is also very important. Having the report without help to solve the issues will only allow you to watch the equipment go to failure not prevent the failure.
As an experienced predictive maintenance person, I did watch equipment progress to failure with no good way to prevent them but I have now developed simple methods to prevent that degradation of equipment.
With proper training and support it is possible to reduce failures, reduce energy consumption and reduce oil & grease consumption for a large boost to a company's bottom line.
I can send you an article I wrote on energy reduction to give you an idea of the magnitude of potential savings.

Here are a couple of items that might begin to answer your question.

This is an excerpt from a magazine

"The leading cause of rotating equipment failures is bearing failure
The leading cause of bearing failures is improper lubrication


Typically less than one-third (approximately 25% to 30%) of all bearings (in industrial

applications) fail because they have reached the end of their design life. Bearings which reach or

exceed their design life generally fail through metal fatigue in the raceways. Since the bearing

has achieved what it was designed to do, it has done its job.



This leaves more than two-thirds (70% to 75%) of all service failures as premature. These are

failures that could have been prevented by carrying out the appropriate actions to rectify the

damage mechanism. Failures due to ineffective or inappropriate lubrication are the most

important of these, accounting for more than 40% of the total failures. Bearings may be

lubricated either by oil or grease and in both cases too little or too much lubrication can cause a

problem."


Also there was an article in Machinery Lubrication Magazine in the Jan 2009 issue entitled "Lubrication Failure = Bearing Failure.

Two good friends of mine passed these items along to me so I have to thank them for their help.

Dear Batfink30,

Another way to look at the root cause of incorrect lubrication is to check viscometrics. Do the lubricants in use have viscsities dictated by the OEM. Many a times during the optimization/rationalizing of lubricants, alternative or nearest viscosities are used. This could lead to failures.

Hussam