Acoustic Lubrication of Bearing
There is nothing better than Acoustic Greasing to maintain the condition of the bearings intact for a longer time. Acoustic greasing ensures the exact quantity of grease in the bearing housing. Acoustic Greasing is actually Ultrasound-guided greasing.
The conventional greasing practice includes adding the grease in the bearing housing through the grease nipple with the help of a grease gun. The technician fills the grease gun with grease & then pumps the grease in the bearing. This procedure has many Cons,
- Mostly while filling the new grease in the grease gun, the technician avoids cleaning previous residue of old grease in the grease gun. Hence, the new grease in the grease gun gets mixed with the residue of older grease. This results in Contaminated Greasing.
- The technician doesn’t have any idea about the quantity of grease to be filled in & it is impossible to guess the exact grease quantity required to pump in the bearing. Hence, mostly excessive greasing is done. This generates a fault of Over Greasing in the bearing housing. The churning of grease inside the bearing housing develops enormous heat and that is harmful to the bearing.
- Sometimes it ends up with Insufficient Greasing for the bearing.
- Another major Con is Cost of greasing goes much higher with the conventional greasing method. The reasons are,
- It is normally done for bearings of all equipment & hence, the quantity of grease replacement goes much higher.
- The conventional method is to do this re-greasing as preventive maintenance & for that plant shutdown is taken. This harms the uptime of the plant & hence, leads to production losses.
- The machine operators remain idle and the maintenance technicians have to work stretched period hence, overtime has to be paid to them.
Thus, conventional re-greasing practices prove to be poor lubrication practices. These Poor lubrication practices account for as much as 80% of all premature bearing failures. When ultrasound is utilized to assess lubrication needs and schedule grease replenishment intervals (acoustic greasing) that number drops below 2%. Another major benefit of Acoustic Greasing is the reduction in the cost of grease consumption. A decrease in bearing-related failures improves spare part optimization. The time saved from assessing bearing condition during the lubrication process is beyond valuable and also it ensures that your lubrication programme is on the right track.
All these Cons get eliminated in Acoustic or Ultrasound Guided Lubrication. Lubrication contamination is also avoided in Acoustic Lubrication and the major Pro is exact & the required amount of grease is pumped in the bearing housing, avoiding over-greasing & under-greasing. This helps in reducing the quantity of grease & inturn reducing the cost of grease, drastically. Acoustic Greasing improves the life of the bearing and therefore, the bearing lives its entire designed life. The infant bearing failures stop.
Many times, bearing failure leads to catastrophic failures of the equipment/machine. The equipment restoration cost goes very high in such cases. The acoustic greasing eliminates such failures & assures the reliability of equipment in this zone.
Acoustic Greasing can be equated to 70% of CBM of bearing.
