Fluid Analysis Data Cuts Downtime

In this article, you will learn:

• How fluid analysis can be used to monitor machine health.
• How machine data optimizes machine performance.
• How to convince fleets to implement fluid analysis.

One of the most frustrating things on a construction site is unexpected downtime. When you’ve put together a team of dedicated professionals, you want to use as much of their time as possible to deliver results, and every hour you spend conducting unexpected maintenance is cost without a return. The best way to minimize the odds of dealing with unexpected maintenance is to optimize your routine maintenance, as well as keep a close eye on your equipment—and luckily, the technology exists now to do this better than ever before.

OEM recommendations are a great baseline for maintaining performance, but any field operator will tell you that machines are sometimes placed in severe service conditions and stressed to the limit. The ability to analyze and monitor machine, component, and lubricant health is critical to optimizing your equipment. To achieve the level of analysis necessary, you need a lubricant analysis program.

Gather data from fluid analysis

Modern construction equipment provides a multitude of ways to gather vital data about your equipment. One of the most popular is a used oil analysis program that provides a structured routine. Regular samples of in-use lubricant are gathered and sent to a lab, where experienced experts subject the samples to a battery of tests to evaluate the oil condition, component condition, and check for contamination. Functioning much like a blood test that you would undergo during an annual medical checkup, expert oil analysis can provide a wealth of information about your equipment, help you plan for upcoming downtime, modify your schedule to alleviate stress, and avoid costly damage.

Another key way to gather data is through an oil drain optimization process: in-depth diagnostics of your entire fleet that identify where your stable of lubricants can be revised, expanded, or consolidated to provide improved performance and longer oil drain intervals (ODIs) while also reducing technical hours associated with oil changes and increasing available tech hours, moving them from oil changes to repairs or project management. Simply put, if a technician isn’t changing oil, they can focus on more productive work.

Implement fluid analysis data

Once you have the data, there are a number of ways it can be utilized to reduce downtime and stress on the equipment, increasing component life and mean time between repairs (MTBR). By conducting repairs on a scheduled basis rather than as needed, you save money and increase available technician hours.

You can also use the data from the engine oil, transmission, or other fluids to determine the best way to optimize your machine’s performance. For example, the final drive rebuild life on crawler dozers might be around 12,000 hours, but through oil analysis, you might determine synthetic lubricants can extend that rebuild life up to 18,000 hours. In other cases, you might run into levels of sodium and potassium in an engine oil sample, indicating a coolant leak. Repairing that leak prevents damage that might otherwise require a full repair, saving, conservatively, $50,000 per engine. And that’s not even factoring in the money you save by having your team spend more time on productivity instead of maintenance.

Finally, the proliferation of fully automated equipment will provide even more opportunities to use data to improve efficiency. Implementing data analysis now and incorporating it into your workflows will make these new opportunities easier to identify in the future.

One of the most common pushbacks against data analytics comes from concern about unnecessary changes to tried-and-true methods. Experienced workers have seen a particular product work reliably in a particular machine for decades and will be hesitant take the risk of an update—repeating the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” 

But with ever more demanding customers and rigorous EPA regulations, it’s not viable to simply dig in your heels. Luckily, one of the perks of data is that it’s easy to predict the outcomes of employing new strategies, since the same tools that tell you what is happening can also be used to tell you what will happen.

You can even use this data in conjunction with more traditional ways to monitor engine performance. If you notice white smoke coming out of equipment, that can indicate a coolant leak—but you can’t always tell where the coolant is leaking. It might not even be coolant at all: It can also mean a ring problem or a variety of other issues. Oil analysis can be a vital tool for filling in those gaps, allowing you to implement repairs long before there’s damage to your equipment. To put it simply: It’s always easier to fix when you know what’s wrong and before it worsens.

Once you start optimizing, the advantages add up quickly. The only way to find out where the limits are is to start now.