Lubrication solutions for the Animal Feed Industry

We offer you a selection of greases to meet your individual operative goals, such as cost reduction via longer relubrication intervals, less consumption, and food safety in this challenging environment of the animal feed production process.

Your benefits at a glance

• Low maintenance cost with increased food safety and an improved ecological footprint
• Reduction of lubricant cost
• Longer maintenance intervals
• Longer bearing life
• Higher production efficiency

An animal feed producer in Malaysia operates several units of pellet press machines, with high utilisation rates. These pellet pressing machines require high quantities of high performance grease for rolling bearing lubrication. Both the bearings and grease are subjected to high loads, vibration and exposure from steam.

To ensure that the bearings are protected from damages due to lubrication starvation, they are re-lubricated at regular intervals of every five hours. The bearing life in the machines was less than forty days, notwithstanding the downtime and effort required to replace the bearings when a bearing is damaged. This affects the production output and incurs high costs for each downtime incident.

Their business objective is to look for a cost effective lubrication solution to improve the overall cost, reliability and productivity of the machines.

The solution provided by Klüber Lubrication was Klüberlub BE 41-402 BH due to its ability to:

• withstand high load of the press roll bearings
• maintain its lubrication properties at high temperatures, up to 120 ˚C
• protect the bearings and extend their life under the observed operating conditions and environment

Overall benefits and values:

• The high performance grease protects the bearings from damage due to its ability to withstand high load and temperatures, in a dusty environment.
• Longer bearing life span is achieved and resulted in lower maintenance cost.
• Production team is able to achieve their productivity targets due to reduced unplanned downtime.

The maintenance team was very satisfied with the solution provided. Since switching to Klüberlub BE 41-402 BH, their grease consumption has reduced by 10% and the bearing life span was extended to above forty days now. This cost effective solution fulfilled their expectations in many ways.

One of the major player in the compound animal feed manufacturing in Malaysia purchased Klüberfood NH1 11-572, a food grade lubricant, as a trial and we took the opportunity to conduct a study to monitor the outcome.

We have concluded the study with two major benefits:

1. Reduction in bearing temperature which resulted in the extension of bearing lifetime

2. Reduction in grease consumption in view of a higher viscosity grease. We also noticed a smaller amount of grease dried up within a similar re-lubrication timeframe.

• The lubrication method was by manual greasing
• The interval of re-lubrication was once a day which is at the start of their shift

From the last trial calculations, we have achieved an estimated of 53% annual savings on lubricant consumption and a reduction of temperature of about 7 - 8 ˚C on the bearing compared to the other brand used.