Contaminated gear oil brought back to reuse standard — steel plant, Shandong

Gear oil at a steel plant in Shandong became contaminated badly enough that equipment failed repeatedly. The oil was not worn out in the chemical sense; it was carrying solids and water that the existing filtration could not take out, and each failure cost a repair that a clean charge would have prevented. Replacing the oil treated the symptom and paid for it again every few months.

Deep purification on site, on the nano-screening equipment, taking the oil back to the cleanliness it was specified for rather than to the cleanliness it happened to have. Solids and water come out first; the membrane then removes the fine fraction that keeps a gear tooth from keeping its film under load.

The indicators were raised to the reuse standard the customer required, and the oil went back into the machine instead of out of the gate. The saving is not the price of a drum: it is the failures that did not happen afterwards, which is the only number that matters to a maintenance manager.