Question: Why is an oil analysis important?
Answer:
How can an oil analysis save you big?
An oil analysis can prevent problems later down the road. It's often been referred to as the blood test for your compressor. Just like a blood test can tell you about your health and early alerts to impending problems, an analysis can do the same for your compressor.
What does an oil analysis tell you?
An oil analysis is a quick, non-harmful way to check the health of your air compressor by looking at what is in the lubricant. Since your oil is used for lubrication and cooling, it's a perfect sample to evaluate.
By analyzing a sample of used machine oil, you can determine the amount of contamination, the wear rates, and overall condition of your machine. The real benefit of an oil analysis is that it acts as an early warning system, alerting you to potential problems before the air compressor goes down or has failure.
When Chicago Pneumatic runs an oil analysis on your machine, we are looking for wear metals, contaminants, and additives that are present in your lubricant. Below are examples of those types of elements.
Wear Metals: Iron, Chromium, Nickel, Aluminum, Lead, Copper, Tin, Silver, Titanium, Vanadium.
Contaminants: Silicon, Sodium, Potassium
Additives: Boron, Molybdenum, Phosphorus, Zinc, Calcium, Barium, Magnesium, Antimony
What do the oil analysis results look like?
An oil analysis report will show a list of all the metals, contaminants, and additives mentioned above with an overall number beside each. A lab will generate a report that will scale the level of risks of normal, monitor, abnormal, and even critical.
Note, one of the most critical roles a compressor lubricant offers is to provide heat removal in the air end. As the air is compressed, it generates a lot of heat. If this heat is not removed rapidly, the bearings, seals, and gears will all fail rapidly. Poor heat removal can be traced to contaminated lubricant or the incorrect lubricant type being used.
Helpful tips for your air compressor
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Monitor contamination around the air compressor: Is your air compressor being stored in a room that you are also doing granite grinding? You wear a mask to protect yourself from breathing in those contaminants, the air compressor needs to be protected from those elements also.
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Lubricants: Are you using the right oil? Make sure you are feeding the correct oil into your machine. All user manuals include the type of oil, usually their own OEM manufacturer lubricants, to be used for that machine.
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Chicago Pneumatic five-year warranty for rotary screws: To maintain warranty coverage, original parts and lubricants must be used in the compressor, oil sampling must be conducted every 2,000 hours, and recommendations based on the results of the oil sample analysis must be followed.
Information provided by Chicago Pneumatics
