Choosing the right lubrication

Why do industries choose the wrong lubricants?

Lubricants typically make up only about 1% of the average company’s total operating costs. But this relatively small amount can earn a tremendous return for your company’s bottom line. The surprising truth is that the lubricants a company chooses can have a significant impact on high-visibility and high-value line items such as energy, labor and equipment costs. This is especially true in the food and beverage industry, where the standards and best practices for properly lubricating machinery can be stringent, and where efficient and cost-effective lubrication must be accomplished while minimizing the risk of potential product contamination and recall.

Once you have a grasp on the true cost of your company’s lubrication program, the next step is to evaluate the best ways to maximize value and cost-effectiveness. Making the right lubrication choices can help ensure that your plant operates with maximum safety, efficiency and yes, profitability.

Here are some key ways in which the choices of lubrication programs can really make a difference in your plant.

Meeting unique food and beverage regulations

Food-grade, food-plant, NSF certified, FDA listed, USDA registered—the list of lubricant terms seems to go on and on. Trying to sift through the terminology, standards and best practices for properly lubricating machines can be overwhelming for facility managers. However, correctly lubricating equipment is essential to any operation’s success. Choosing and implementing the right lubrication program will ensure that a plant operates more safely and efficiently, in addition to making it more profitable. Most importantly of all, choosing the right lubricant will help ensure that your plant meets lubrication standards unique to the food and beverage industry.

Keep Friction and Wear At Bay

Lubrication does more than make surfaces slick and slippery. It provides a coating to prevent metal-on-metal contact between the surfaces of moving parts. No matter how polished and smooth these surfaces may appear, they actually have rough surfaces at a microscopic level. Tiny peaks (called asperities) stick out and scrape against opposing surfaces, causing friction. Friction interferes with smooth motion. It also causes heat, increases surface wear and can lead to equipment failure. Proper lubrication creates a layer of film between moving parts to thwart friction, thereby promoting smoother operation and longer equipment life.

Protect Equipment

The protective layer formed by lubrication helps safeguard component surfaces against rust and corrosion by preventing them from coming in contact with water or other corrosive substances. Lubricants also serve as conduits that suspend and carry away contaminants to filters or other separators in the system where they can be removed and not harm components.

Enhance Temperature Control

Lubricants absorb heat, drawing it away from surfaces. Depending on the application, a lubricant either dissipates the heat or transports it to a cooling device. In either case, lubricants help keep operational temperatures in balance and reduce the risk of heat-related component damage.

Improve the Life Span, Efficiency and Reliability of Machinery

By minimizing friction, wear, excessive heat, rust, corrosion, contamination and more, lubrication helps equipment do its job longer, more consistently and more effectively. Lubrication significantly reduces exposure to many causes of potentially costly equipment breakdowns and failures.

Reduce the Downtime and Costs Associated with Maintenance and Repair

Because properly lubricated equipment runs longer and more reliably, operations don’t need to be interrupted as frequently for maintenance and repairs. Therefore, lubrication reduces costs to maintain, repair and replace equipment and parts. Plus, minimizing operational interruptions helps improve productivity which, in turn, increases revenue potential.