Two Minute Tips  

The First Step to Creating a World-Class Oil Analysis Program

Evan Zabawski | Senior Technical Advisor, TestOil

When you start implementing an oil analysis program, you need to decide which equipment in the plant to sample. This can be a daunting task but it cannot be overlooked. Supervisors and management need to take the time to identify the targeted equipment, write detailed procedures, establish routes, and sampling schedules.

Equipment critical to plant operations should be identified first. This equipment often does not have a backup unit to replace it when it is not in service. In addition, major repairs and overhaul of critical equipment often require a complete plant shutdown, substantial manpower and subsequent loss of production activities.

Critical equipment in plants typically have these common characteristics:

  • They require very high capital investment and are expensive to maintain and repair.
  • They are engineered for long service lives when operated within design specifications and in a predictable environment.
  • Many are quite large and are made up of several individual components.
  • Downtime is quite expensive since production is usually halted when unexpected problems or a system failure is experienced.

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About the Author

Evan Zabawski Senior Technical Advisor, TestOil

Evan is a Certified Lubrication Specialist. Evan has extensive experience training tradesmen and professionals in a variety of fields including: lubrication fundamentals, contamination control, condition monitoring, RCM/FMEA and used oil analysis. Evan has been a member of STLE for over 20 years, serving as Chair of the Alberta Section for 8 years, and also as an instructor of the Condition Monitoring course at STLE Annual Meetings. Currently, Evan has Editor of TLT Magazine, and have served as the Editor for The STLE Alberta Section’s Basic Handbook of Lubrication – Third Edition, and contributed as one of the editors for STLE/CRC’s Handbook of Lubrication and Tribology, Volume II: Theory and Design, Second Edition. Evan has published several technical papers and am also a member in good standing of API and ASTM.