Condition Based Maintenance and Fluid Analysis
By: David Wilson, John Deere Construction and Forestry Equipment
Condition Based Maintenance:
The golden nugget for reducing long term operating costs in any
equipment operation is improving the type of maintenance performed on
that equipment. Moving from a fix as fail maintenance program to a
periodic maintenance environment is a good step, but not nearly effective
enough to drastically improve the maintenance costs of your business.
Condition based maintenance (CBM) is the key. CBM is built around
maintaining the health of the machine based upon the specific needs in
that application. These needs are gathered through fluid analysis,
detailed machine inspections, and other tools available to control
machine health. Although CBM is the preferred choice of maintenance
for many manufacturers, distributors and customers sometimes
struggle to adopt the concept. It’s a different way of maintaining the
true health of a machine to realize the maximum productivity, uptime,
and lowest daily operating costs possible from that investment.
Before learning about CBM, we should understand the various
different types of maintenance practices we see in the field today. With
the reactive type of maintenance, the equipment owner does not use oil
analysis and waits for things to break down before repairing them. This
approach does not allow for planning or scheduling repairs when they
are most convenient to the job. It is the most expensive maintenance
practice. We can use the example of the brakes on our own vehicles.
We only replace the brakes when we hear them start to squeak. Even
then we often go longer and have to replace the entire rotor when just
pad would have sufficed.
The more advanced equipment owner utilizes periodic or scheduled
maintenance, with limited oil analysis, and is able to prevent some
failures. In this mode, the owner is more focused on following the
maintenance manual than what the real operating conditions and health
of the machine demand.
Condition based maintenance is where we want to be. The
equipment owner works to eliminate the root cause of failures and
anticipates the needs of the equipment. Most repairs can be planned
before they turn into a major failure. And lastly, the owner realizes life
extensions and savings in a systematic approach.
Graphic Courtesy Noria Corp.
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Reliance Upon Fluid Analysis:
Some of the CBM tools available today include infrared imaging,
airborne ultrasound, and others. Although these technologies are very
promising, they are not yet widely adopted throughout the industry. The
tool we use today that is precise, effective, and typically underutilized—
is fluid analysis (FA). FA can detect wear in progress at levels that are
normally otherwise undetectable. A discussion of FA can be found later
in this report.
Why Does CBM Make Sense?
In this graphic from Hudacheck and Dodd (which is now an industry
wide accepted study), the study shows us that the cost of reactive
maintenance per HP per Year is three times more than that of World
Class Maintenance, and is twice as much as CBM maintenance.
Cost wise, for component life and uptime, CBM does make sense for
your business.
Let’s think about this question: what is scheduled maintenance? It’s
actually repairing a machine after it fails. It’s what most of us do today.
We service machines at intervals suggested by the maintenance decal
or operator’s manual. This gives the owner some peace of mind, but a
false sense of security. The owner doesn’t really have visibility to
machine health that is so critical to component life.
This type of scheduled maintenance, although owners often feel good
that they’re maintaining the machine, is a blind type of maintenance
because it cannot prevent failure. It does not practice root cause
analysis, nor can it preempt unscheduled downtime. It is in fact the
most expensive approach and creates stressed relationships between
dealer/distributor and customer. If the dealer can fix the machine rapidly,
he’s a hero. If the part is not in stock, or he can’t get to the machine as
the customer expects, he’s the villain.
With this logic, relations with the manufacturer, dealer, and dealer
service personnel are all stressed as everything happens inadvertently
and always as a surprise to the owner.
Using the CBM tools available to understand the machine information
is power for extended component life and maximum uptime. How well
you manage this information will determine the degree of success
applying CBM.
Finally, establishing root cause analysis of the condition or failure
observed leads to avoiding repetitive failure. This cycle repeats again,
producing a fleet that seldom breaks down and repairs are done when
it is more convenient to the maintenance crew and your schedule.
CBM Big Three:
• CBM is not about scheduled services as we have typically done.
• It is not about changing oil and filters at recommended intervals.
• CBM is about servicing machines when it is required, based on
actual machine health readings, and anticipating the
maintenance needs of that machine.
Imagine how much savings you could realize if you scheduled all of
your downtime instead of just waiting for it to happen!
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Understanding Wear:
We need to understand how things wear out in order to understand
CBM. Let’s look at this study from professor Rabinowicz from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Less than 50% of equipment in the field today meets acceptable
cleanliness standards! (John Deere)
It’s About Visibility…
Successful condition based maintenance is more than just oils and
filters. It’s about having visibility to the real heath of the machine.
Without visibility to machine vitals, we can only react to what just did
happen instead of planning for what will happen.
To put this in perspective, we can make the same comparison in
humans as we do in construction equipment.
Look at the example below. These guys both have the same weight,
workout routine, diet, and generally appear to be the same. But one of
these guys has a problem. One of these guys is bound to have more
severe health problems related to high cholesterol. Without the proper
visibility to this condition, one of these guys could be in a potential life
threatening situation.

70% of the loss of usefulness occurs from surface degradation. Out of

that percentage, 20% is caused by corrosion and 50% by mechanical
wear. This theory brings light to the understanding of wear. It also
shows us that we can affect the outcome of wear by acting upon those
conditions that are the essential cause of wear.
Since 20% of the wear comes from corrosion, we also need to
understand the chemical aspect of the environment, and how our
actions can also control this aspect. We can potentially control up to
70% of the causes of wear. How well we can tackle these causes will
be determined by the quality of our maintenance discipline. This will
ultimately affect equipment uptime, operation cost, and productivity of
your machine.
One fact that owners and maintenance managers often disregard is With construction equipment, visibility to machine health is equally
that wear starts the same day the machine is put in operation. Some wear important. This example depicts a very common situation – two
is detectable through condition based maintenance practices, and some machines operating in the same conditions, but one of them has a
is simply undetectable. But machine behavior and health change as hours problem. One of these machines is going to fail prematurely if the issue
accumulate on the machine. Wear becomes more visible to standard is not corrected.
maintenance practices provided we are able to interpret the data.
At the normal wear phase, using CBM practices, we can save
components and keep machine operating normally. At this phase we
can detect wear easily and act upon the results. However, when we
reach the point of no return, we have allowed the systems to wear so
much that an overhaul becomes the only solution.
When symptoms appear, it is usually well beyond the initial detection
point. The machine may have been sending messages through oil
analysis, but someone either forgot to read them or didn’t understand
how to interpret the results. When symptoms are so visible that your
operator complains about machine performance, that tells us that we’ve
ignored all the previous messages about wear. The only solution left is
to repair the machine and start again. This just doesn’t make sense for
your business. Owners and maintenance managers have the Without visibility to the elevated silica (dirt) level in the engine of this
opportunity to avoid these types of issues by making educated loader, the owner will more than likely not experience the life cycle he
decisions based upon CBM inputs. expected when the machine was purchased.
Machines are built upon strict engineering standards to be able to
Some facts about wear: withstand their intended applications under normal operating conditions.
• 91 % of pumps replaced in the 4000 hour range fail due to However, this is not to say that all components will not remain clean and
contamination related issues. (John Deere) sealed if we do not maintain the machine. Fluid analysis gives us this
• 48% of bearings fail due to poor lubrication and contamination. (SKF) visibility to machine contaminants and fluid condition.
• For every 10 degrees over 70 Degrees C, oil life is cut in half. Machines ingest contaminants from the outside, from elements
(Noria Corporation) inside, from chemical reactions, from heat, air, water, and from mixing
lubricants. Breathers and filters are good for 15 to 10 microns, but we’re

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dealing with particles that can pass through cylinder seals. Close
monitoring is required to get the expected life of components.
In summation, a machine operating with high contaminant levels is
similar to living with high cholesterol or high blood pressure. Both can
affect your health. And similar to cholesterol, high contamination is a
correctable condition. Most machines are fluid dependent systems, just
like the human body. Lubricants, hydraulic fluids, coolants, fuels, and air
bring contaminants into the system and transport the contaminants within
the system. When too much contamination is in a system, the
components wear and machine performance decreases. This could lead to
shorter service life or catastrophic failure just like a massive heart attack.
Particle Contamination — What We Can’t See:
When we talk about particle contamination in equipment, we’re talking
about microscopic pieces that we typically don’t understand. And since
we can’t see the problem, we like to think it doesn’t exist. But it does.
As we see in the graphic below, our eyes can only see 40 microns. That
is half the diameter of a human hair. Particles of these sizes cause
catastrophic failures, but at the same time they are easy to catch with filters.
However, particles in sizes like talcum powder at 10 micron or red
blood cells at 5 micron, are the reccurring enemy of hydraulic systems.
These particles are so small that we cannot see them, but they are
ultimately responsible for the life of pumps and motors. This is
especially important when we consider that millions of them circulate
through the system each day, eroding the surfaces they touch.
The Top Five Contributors to Pump Failure:
Throughout the industry, it’s been established that particle
contamination, moisture, wrong or degraded oil, and high temperatures
account for the majority of the pump and motor failures today.
The graphic below vividly depicts what we see everyday in
equipment and is confirmed by warranty analysis.
Graphic Courtesy Noria Corp.
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• If particle contamination is the number one cause for pump
failures, shouldn’t we be doing particle counts on every hydraulic
fluid analysis? Many people don’t.
• If the number two cause for pump failure is moisture, shouldn’t
we be doing water content analysis by Karl-Fischer and not by
crackle or infrared testing? Most fluid analysis users don’t know
the difference.
• The third contributor to pump failure is wrong or mixed fluids in a
machine. Most people think that oil is oil and have no regard for
contamination by mixed fluid.
• In regards to the fourth cause of failure, which is degraded fluid,
we should be measuring total acid number and oxidation. But
how often do we do it?
• Lastly, high temperature is also guilty in contributing to pump
failures. Are your machines equipped with performance history
software or a way to determine system temperatures? If not, do
you know how often your machines run at or over the limit?
Different industry statistics show that the majority of failures in
hydraulic systems are caused not by design flaws, but by
contaminants, excessive water, or fluid degradation.
Hydraulic systems are designed to provide years of trouble free
service. But in many instances, the systems in which these
components work have been altered by foreign contaminants that were
not detected and/or remedied soon enough.
Another contamination related issue that must be addressed is how a
machine is repaired after failure. Oftentimes the technician has not been
adequately trained to understand the micro-contamination world that the
hydraulic system is so dependent upon. It’s common to see repair
actions that only include replacing the most affected component and the
oil from the reservoir. Doing so leaves behind millions of destructive
particles lodged in lines, valves, and coolers on the machine.
Regardless of the situation, the results are always the same. The
owner sees premature failure of the main component and an even
greater level of contamination throughout the rest of the system. The
story is repeated over and over again and the blame for the inexplicable
failure is displaced to many different people.
Fluid Analysis—The Beauty of Complete Information:
There are many different companies in the market today that perform
all different sorts of fluid analysis. Oftentimes equipment owners and
maintenance managers fall victim to partnering with the low cost
provider to save cost. In saving this cost, they’re not utilizing the full
power of complete fluid analysis. A complete report provides the
information you require to make a good assessment of the sample and
subsequently make educated maintenance decisions.
The graphic shows Staveley/CTC’s current report for engines. It has

grouped wear metals on the left followed by additives on the right.
Below the wear metals and additives, you find information about
contaminants like dirt, glycol, soot, sulfation, and nitration. To the right of
this group are the physical properties like viscosity, oxidation, and TBN. All
of these elements are required to perform a complete review of the sample.
A good hydraulic and power train report is laid out very similarly. The
wear metals, additives, contaminants, and physical properties are all
still grouped together, but on a hydraulic or power train report there
should be one more group. Particle counts should be included in the
4/6/14 micron ranges. The reports should also include elements such as
TAN, viscosity, oxidation, other physical properties.
Water or foreign moisture is detrimental to many oil based systems.
Water over 1000 PPM or 0.10% is not healthy for any hydraulic system,
transmission, axle, or final drive. It causes instant increases in copper
readings and also affects particle counts readings.
The graphic below demonstrates what a complete report would look
like when water is extremely high.
To a trained eye, the strange reading of 23/23/22 implies high water
content. Cleanliness readings are usually linear with regard to the
cleanliness code table and the numbers in this example are not linear at all.
One way to determine if your engine has coolant in the engine oil is
to measure Na (sodium) and K (potassium). When these two elements
/ Lubrication Basics
are present together, high coolant contamination in the oil is indicated
as shown on the graphic below.
When Na was 7—that’s a feature of the additive package. When it
gets to 449—that’s contamination. It’s an extreme level. The rise in
copper suggests that coolant leak is coming from oil cooler—which is
made of bronze. Furthermore, we know the additive package in this fluid
has been consumed because TBN is 4.41. TBN below 5 is dangerous
because the oil is becoming too acidic and is losing the capacity to
neutralize further acidic contamination.
While it is nice to have TBN on a sample report, it’s not quite a
complete report without some other critical elements. With TBN and no
sulfation information, we don’t understand why there’s high iron as
indicated in the graphic below. Furthermore, oxidation is also
approaching the limit. The combination of high sulfation, near limit
oxidation, low TBN, and high iron tells us that this engine is more than
likely using high sulfur fuel which means engine oil needs to be changed
more frequently.
Without a complete report, we’re not able to accurately evaluate the
sample report to make truly educated maintenance decisions.
In Summation:
Using the tools of condition based maintenance to make educated
maintenance decisions can change the face of maintenance we know today.
CBM provides equipment owners the opportunity to control maintenance
costs proactively and operate more profitably to meet the financial metrics
of the organization. Continuing to maintain machines through periodic or
scheduled maintenance will only maintain the status quo.
To achieve best in class productivity, uptime, and lowest daily
operating costs, a new maintenance methodology is required. Condition
based maintenance is the key.
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