Jim Fitch believes industry rides on a film of oil - that industry’s very existence depends on a protective layer of lubricant on gears, bearings and engine components.
Fitch, chairman and president of Noria Corporation, a global technical consulting and training group, is not backward in emphasising the central role played by lubricants and hydraulic fluids in heavy equipment industries such as mining. And you don’t come much better versed in the role of fluids and lubricants in equipment maintenance than Jim Fitch.
By the age of 12 Fitch was spending his weekends at his father’s research laboratory at Oklahoma State University watching tests being conducted on lubricants and hydraulic fluids. By 1982 he had founded Diagnetics, out of which came an impressive array of oil analysis instruments and software, many of which are still used today. Fitch himself holds the patents for seven devices for measuring various properties of lubricants.
In 1997, Diagnetics was sold to the Entek Division of Rockwell International.
Today, Fitch heads Noria Corporation out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The group specialises in technical consulting and education in lubrication, tribology (the study of wear and friction), machine reliability and oil analysis.
Noria was a “best practice collector”, said Fitch, and as such the organisation’s mandate was to disseminate what it knew throughout industry around the world. “We train, consult and interact with multiple users across all industries. We take what world-class organisations have taught us and get those lessons into the hands of people with similar aspirations,” he said.
Noria publishes two US-based magazines, Machinery Lubrication, and Practicing Oil Analysis, (Fitch edits both) which focus on technical issues related to oils and lubricants. The group also produces an electronic newsletter containing lubrication tips and advice from operators.
Ask Fitch what the mining industry can do better and a slightly scary story emerges. Noria has trained thousands of lubrication professionals around the world and has conducted best practice lubrication audits at mine sites in countries such as South Africa, Canada and the United States. “It is amazing to walk onto a mine site and see maintenance practices identical to what we would have seen 30 or 50 years ago,” Fitch said.
“One of the problems is the perpetuation of old, outdated practices, such as how you introduce lubricants into a machine, how you drain a compartment, how you grease a bearing, or how you change a filter.”
Mining, like most industries, has in general not kept up with lubrication best practices. One of the reasons is that many maintenance people at mine sites are trained in succession, the senior maintenance person trains the young apprentice, perpetuating outdated procedures and practices. Lack of formal training of maintenance and lubrication professionals is at the heart of the problem. It is also essential to elevate the importance and stature of those who do machinery lubrication, according to Fitch.
The single most direct impact a mine could make on maintenance practices, he said, would be to examine how fluids were handled, stored and applied.
“It is rarely the lubricant itself that’s the problem – it’s how we use it,” Fitch said.
For instance, cross-contamination between two lubricants was a commonly observed problem at mines. “You might get a bit of grease mixed in with a final drive or a bit of hydraulic fluid mixed with motor oil. It only takes a drop of motor oil in a hydraulic fluid to lose all the demulsifying properties of that lubricant,” he said.
“This amount of cross-contamination to most maintenance people seems negligible but in reality it can be very severe and can reduce the life of lubricant by over 90%.”
In other instances, practices to extend the life of oils and reduce costs are misguided and more costly in the long-term. At some mines for example, the oil drain interval on a diesel engine has been extended from 250 hours to 450 hours by fluid conditioning, including enhancing the filtration and proper selection of lubricants. But, as Fitch pointed out, particle content alone was not the only reason an oil would be condemned from continued use.
“You have to run a test and make sure other properties are fit for service such as anti-foam, rust-inhibiting and oxidation stability,” he said.
It is often at the level of nuance and detail that things are missed or taken for granted. Thankfully, the mining industry is not without its star performers, one of which is the JR Simplot phosphate mine, in Wyoming, thought to be the largest high-grade phosphate mine in the western USA.
Historically equipment maintenance at the mine represented 30-40% of its total operating costs, with the haul-truck fleet consuming up to 70% of the total maintenance budget. Benchmarking the mine’s maintenance costs against other openpit phosphate mines revealed sizable gaps between the mine’s performance and industry best practice. Numerous improvement opportunities were discovered such as increasing the life of the haul truck diesel engines. The original equipment manufacturer (OEM) recommended an engine rebuild at 15,000 operating hours and prior to the new maintenance initiatives, the mine had reduced this to 14,000 hours.
The mine recognised that poor lubrication management was a primary cause of engine failure and came up with a strategy to help extend engine life. This included an upgrade to a better quality lubricant (30% more expensive); higher quality fuel filters; and the introduction of oil analysis. Over time, the oil analysis method was refined to include elemental spectroscopy trend analysis supplemented by back-washing filters to predict engine failures. In addition to oil analysis, regular inspections were made to assess the condition of the machine.
The average number of hours between engine rebuilds has been increased to more than 18,000 hours, up 37%. Amortised rebuild costs for the engines have dropped from $US8.26 to $US5.68 per operating hour, equating to an annualised cost reduction of more than $US15,000. The maintenance team’s goal is to achieve a mean-time-between-rebuild of 25,000 hours. Nearly doubling engine life will cut the annualised rebuild cost in half to about $US25,000.
While mine site practice is one issue, the agenda about improved maintenance practices is currently being lead by several OEMs. As keynote speaker at Caterpillar’s World-Wide Contamination Control Conference in March this year, Fitch observed a significant push from that company to proactively address contamination in engine oils, gear lubricants and hydraulic fluids.
