Lubricators sustain five years without breakdown

January 2024 Motion Control & Drives

After a food manufacturing plant suffered frequent breakdowns of its electrical motors, Lubrication Engineers (LE) recommended the use of automated single-point lubricators. Five years later the client has not had a single mechanical breakdown. Before the single-point system was installed, each of the 150 lubrication points at the facility had to be manually lubricated. This was an enormous task for the maintenance team, with many of the lubrication points located in hard to reach places. The magnitude of the work and the accessibility challenges inevitably led to some bearings being over- or under-lubricated, resulting in misalignment, trapped dirt forming grooves in the bearing components, metal fatigue, or localised rapid wear.

Managing the switchover was a large undertaking, and the LE team had to set up each lubricator according to the different bearing specifications. Once this was done, however, the lubricant was dispensed at the appropriate intervals and quantities for each bearing. This meant that the time of the client’s maintenance team was no longer dominated by managing lubrication schedules. The automated dispensing of the lubricant also meant that the bearings did not have to be stopped in order to be lubricated.

The single-point lubricators installed at the facility dispense LE’s Almagard Vari-Purpose Lubricant – an extremely tacky product that is recommended for extended service applications. It is a long-lasting product that helps to eliminate bearing failures, can extend bearing life spans, and does not harden with age.

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