Greasing without fear
Open flames, steam everywhere, hissing, crackling sounds, and dust. A steel hardening shop is not for the faint-hearted craving optimal room temperature. The blazing heat near the ovens makes for a literally hot job of the maintenance teams. To some extent, they, too, work close to open fires – which is inevitable due to the hardening processes. Plus, some of the machine components are hard to access. There are hundreds of lubrication points in hardening shops that must be supplied with lubricants to ensure reliable operation: a task that can hardly be performed economically without the utilization of automatic lubricating systems that also help reduce the risk of accidents.
At Schaeffler’s plant in Schweinfurt, more than 30,000 metric tons (33,000 short tons) of inner and outer rings of rolling bearings and rolling elements are hardened per year. That means workpieces are heated to the point of glowing and subsequently quenched in water or a salt bath. The drive pinions, racks, linear guides, and bearings of the hardening ovens used to be greased with conventional lubricators. In Schweinfurt, Schaeffler switched to digital lubricators. Key reasons were a lower risk of accidents and higher transparency.
20
hours per month is the time a maintenance team saves by using Schaeffler’s OPTIME C1 digital lubricator because there’s no more need for lubrication checks.
“Not only in hardening shops digital lubricators increase work safety. No matter in which industrial setting, be it in the steel, paper, or wood sectors, in mining or in gravel plants, no matter how dark, dirty, or hot it is – when maintenance workers need to get physically close to the lube point to relubricate the area with a manual grease gun that can entail a risk. Plus, the lube points require regular relubrication. In the case of manual lubrication, there’s a greater need to be present in hazardous areas,” explains Tony May, Technical Sales Consultant at Schaeffler Lifetime Solutions.
Nearly 100% lower risk
Take a powerplant for example: A power unit needs to be lubricated once a week with two strokes from a grease gun. “Typically, that’s 1.5 cubic centimeters (0.1 cubic inches) of grease per stroke, so amounting to three cubic centimeters (0.2 cubic inches) of grease per week,” May says. With a fully automatic lubrication system that usually has a grease reservoir of 125 cubic centimeters (7.6 cubic inches), the machine will continuously be supplied with grease. “Because digital lubrication systems reduce grease consumption the cartridge only had to be replaced after a little more than a year. As a result, the time workers must spend on replacements is reduced to once a year instead of a weekly relubrication, reducing the risk by nearly 100 percent. Plus, the production process can continue without any disruptions,” explains May.
“We often encounter open flames, so keeping a distance from them is important. With OPTIME C1, lube points can be greased fully automatically without workers having to be present in hazardous areas.”
In Schaeffler’s hardening shop in Schweinfurt, two systems were recently equipped with 70 OPTIME C1s. The smart lubricators consist of a grease cartridge, a gateway, and a digital service, visualizing the data in a mobile app or on a web-based dashboard and indicating all relevant operating parameters (fill level, battery, temperature, etc.) and trouble (empty status, counter-pressure, etc.). The relevant data from OPTIME C1 are transmitted directly to the Schaeffler cloud, so that the hardening shop’s maintenance team can always access the data by means of a smartphone or browser. There’s no need for inspections, which not only saves time but reduces the risk of accidents as well.