Whenever we mention to our customers the necessity to perform effective Predictive Maintenance procedures, everybody agrees on that. It’s part of the evolved routine duties to make sure that your assets are constantly maintained under control, in order to avoid major failures involving hazards or production’s losses. But when it comes to the practice, to really confirm in the field which is the actual status of you critical systems, and your conditions’ monitoring choice (for that particular area) are oil analysis, all the problems, related with difficult approaches show up. Basically we get to prepare the lines where our interventions are forecasted/provided with special, hassle free sampling ports. The situations for technicians involved with such surveys are always a very complicated task; every time we get to comply with new, increasingly difficult situations. Safety restrictions are not the last of them. The oil is running (or at least we imagine that) in our machines, totally confined inside the circuits, at a given temperature and pressure. To “capture” the proper amount of such fluid in the right way (the basic condition to make sure that the sample is telling me “the truth” about the whole story) I need to create a “gap” or a media to let it flow outside of. On the other hand I want to be ready at the proper time, with a bottle or something specially adapted to collect that specimen, and I do not want to create interferences (cross-contamination) of any kinds in this critical moment. Airborne dust, humidity in the atmosphere, eventual paper tissues’ debris, try immediately to join together, enormously attracted by the sample bottle left unattended, with the mouth wide opened!
Sometimes a mosquito too, may decide to put an end to her life, jumping in the freshly collected oil. What a mess, for someone that is challenging to provide “a picture” of the inner status of a certain machine, for an effective Predictive maintenance approach.
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