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Hydrotex Grease Grease analysis made easy! Herguth Laboratories, Inc works closely with major grease supplier’s such as Hydrotex to keep up to date on formulas and method of analysis. Approximately 90 percent of all bearings are lubricated with grease. But how much do you know about the grease or greased bearings in your plant? Grease analysis is certainly not for every bearing … maybe it’s not even for most bearings. But when you have a need to know, a thorough analysis of the grease in question can prevent headaches and save money. Historically, the analysis of grease has been confined to new grease testing for product acceptance and quality control. Technically, this was due to the sample size required to perform conventional ASTM (American Society of Testing and Materials) methods on grease samples. However, over the last couple of decades, new analytical methods have made it possible to profile the serviceability of grease using as few milligrams of sample as possible (0.00003527 of an ounce). The philosophical issues with sampling used greases are twofold. First, if the whole bearing must be sent to the lab just to get at the grease under the shield, what good is the analysis? Second, if you can get to the bearing grease without dismantling the bearing, is the sample reliable and representative of the condition of both the grease and the bearing? These two problems are quite different. If a plant has hundreds of greased bearings that are so hard to get to that they must be removed and sent to the laboratory for grease analysis, the data obtained on a few bearings may need to be extrapolated across the entire bearing population to draw appropriate conclusions. An example of this might be to identify the root cause of a number of repeat bearing failures plant-wide. Experience shows that within a given application and environment, most of the failures, if they are lubrication-related, will stem from the same root cause. Therefore, it is worth the effort to take a group of bearings with varying service life and submit them for analysis. Once complete, the test results can be used to make an informed decision about grease selection, regreasing intervals common wear mechanisms and typical cleanliness levels. The second philosophical issue; that of whether the grease sample is truly representative, is slightly more complex to resolve. In this case, the technician needs to be aware of the differences in information that can be obtained from grease located at the bearings raceway interfaces, compared to grease that has been pushed out and is around the outside area of the housing, in much the same way as sample point location is vital when taking used oil samples. Generally, the grease sample of interest is the grease doing the work at the working interfaces, in the load zone of the bearing. This grease sample will have the most evidence of wear, contamination and degradation and in general will be the most representative, although it will likely also be the most difficult to obtain. For more information call 1-888-HERGUTH (437-4884) |
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