water in Lube Oil

Yahya,

Having sold millions of litres of Castrol TLX series to Wartsila and other DG sets in India I have experienced such problems.

Wartsila's have an Alfa Laval centrifuge seperator for cleaning fuels like FO. A water wash is often adopted; and has, in many instances the cause of water contamination.

Coming to the lube, I am surprised at the use of TLX 554. In my days TLX 554 was used only for topping or sweetening. The practice was to run on TLX 304 or TLX 404 and only on complaints of rapid TBN depletion, resort to TLX 504 or 554.

In no circumstances can you use the water contaminated oil, more so as high TBN oil is in use, which would also indicate that fuel used has high sulphur. Use of water contaminated oil would result in severe rusting and corrosion.

Small quantity of water in oil can be dehydrated using vacuum dehydration. If water has not already emulsified in the barrels in storage you may like to centrifuge the same and conduct a "crackle test" to check for moisture. Pls also recheck with supplier and obtain a "go" "no-go" for the sample.

Should you require additional details you may contact hussam_adeni@yahoo.com.

Hussam Adeni

Yahya,

1. Check Total Acid No of contaminated oil.
General criterion to condemn oil is 50%
increase over baseline.

2. Water contamination wipes out dispersant
additives,could eventually forms soot
Agglomeration,abrasive wear.Check dispersant
characteristics of Contaminated oil.

3. If TAN and Dispercancy is out of limits,then
consider oil reclamation.

4. If TAN and Dispersancy is within limits,
suggest to apply vacuum dehydration.
If moisture level improves,oil can be reused.
Keep monitoring through oil analysis.

5. Identifying the root cause of water
contamination is the best maintenance
practice.

Regards

Bala.

Yahya,
With this much water, the oil must have emulsified, centrifuges are unable to remove moisture in emulsified or dissolved form.Your oil is still OK,if moisture is removed. There is one Oil Purifier Klarol which removes solid particles upto 1 micron by absorption in cellulose and removes moisture by Thin film evaporation theory, it can remove water both in dissolved and emulsified forms.You can use this cleaning system mounted on a trolley to clean the oil kept in barrels at your place and after proper testing can use it without any fear, it is not advisable to throw huge quantity of such oil which can be recouped easily.
If you can give me your location I may suggest something concrete, however you may contact me at minimac@rediffmail.com

Yahya and all,

you are in right track, you identify the problem and now you are doing some research.
Bala allreay gave you good tips in oil quality determination. Once you idnetify if the capabilies still there is time to fight against water.
I strongly recomend you attack the water issue from two points of action:
1. Determine Root Cause analysis, guess is not an option. Once you determine the real cause, solve the problem and design a monitoring system to determine future water ingresion.
2. If the results from the lab for the used oil are ok (with the exeption of water of course) performa a vacuum dehydration, this will eliminate free, emulsified and disolved water. Some units will filter the oil in the same process.

Try looking at www.allenfiltersinc.com. The Hydroscav can remove 100% free and emulsified water and dissolved water down to 50 ppm or less.
We had good results in the Aramco/ExxonMobil refineries

Yahya,

Just one more suggestion - the elemental analysis did not include any of the additive packages such as Zn, Ca or Mg typically used in formulating diesel engine oils. I suggest you also get analysis on the water contaminated oil again for additives and talk to the oil supplier to see if the results obtained are typical of the product. This will also give some indication if water has affected the additive packages.

If anyone needs help outfitting their high speed oil centrifuges with a water in oil monitoring unit and display or controller, let me know.

Hussam Adeni gets an 'A', everyone else needs to study up on their Marine diesels, which are animals quite unlike almost any system you've seen. The almost absurdly high TBN protects against corrosion from the high-sulfur #6 (aka bunker) fuel, but the downside is that when it gets wet, it holds onto the water with a death grip. None of the usual treatments for wet oil are going to give satisfactory results. A new oil TBN of 55 translates to about 2% ELEMENTAL calcium (that's not counting the rest of the molecule, sulfonate or carbonate, that the calcium is attached to). Most diesel crankcase lubes run about 1/10 of that.
It sounds like the high-TBN oil is in the crankcase? I'm a little surprised to hear about an engine running on #6 that isn't running the high-TBN as a once-through in the cylinders with a lower TBN in the crankcase. Again, Hassam sounds like he's onto something there. Use a lower TBN in the crankcase and only make up with a high-TBN oil when necessary. However, in my experience I've seen more of a problem with TBN increase in the crankcase due to leaky stuffing boxes than TBN loss.
I fear your wet oil is slop; I hope you don't have too much of it. Good luck!

Dear Yahah I recomnd u to sale out this oil in aone pone and make money . good luck

TAN of hydraulic oil new should be always less than 1.
Our DNR Corp HYD oil68 has TAN of 0.00022 means if it gets mixed with metal working fluid than also it will not contaminate MWF.Hence life of MWF will increase drastically. In case of injection machines this oil will outperform because to reach tan of more than 1 it will take around 10000 hrs.

DNR Corp
91 22 9820229229.