Achieve robust protection from modern gearboxes

The cost of machine downtime can be astronomical in industrial plants, and facility managers are tasked with doing everything in their power to maximize uptime and reliability.

Industrial gearboxes are common assemblies found inside a wide variety of industrial environments, such as wind turbine drives, conveyer belt drives, robotics, or crusher drives. A single part failure inside a gearbox can result in complete production shutdown, lost throughput, lost revenue, and high maintenance costs. Typically, the minimum production downtime from a gearbox failure is around two to three hours. For somewhere like a steel mill, this may mean losses in production totaling in excess of $200,000 per hour. This doesn’t include labor costs, which can be excessive if outside contractors are required to make repairs. For large mills, these costs can balloon exponentially.

This scenario serves to highlight the importance of high-performance industrial gear oils (IGOs) and their ability to provide robust protection for these critical pieces of machinery. In recent years, IGOs have become even more important, with industrial markets demanding higher productivity and 24/7 operation, elevated levels of protection to ensure durability and extended gearbox life, and increased power to operate at a range of extreme temperatures.

How have IGOs managed to keep pace with these growing demands? In this article, we’ll explore the evolution of IGOs, some inherent challenges involved in modern formulation techniques, and how the right chemistries can help provide complete protection to help plants get the most from their most critical gearbox applications.

Modern machine demands

Modern industrial activity has sought efficiency gains in every aspect of regular operation—and IGOs are no different. Today, it is expected that IGOs provide longer drain intervals so that the maintenance of replacing the oils must be performed less frequently. Simultaneously, modern gearboxes have become smaller and operate hotter in order to minimize design footprint and maximize efficiency, respectively.

These needs are driving formulations toward the use of synthetic base stocks rather than traditional mineral oil base stocks. Particularly within environments that regularly experience harsh conditions (mining, marine, wind, and steel), synthetic IGO formulations can deliver extended drain intervals while providing robust protection for all elements of the gearbox, helping to lower total cost of ownership for critical equipment.

Formulating high-performance IGOs

So, how have IGOs evolved to accommodate these demands? First, it’s important to understand the fundamental performance characteristics synthetic IGO formulations must provide in today’s gearboxes:

• wear protection, helping to prevent failure modes like micropitting, cracking, and scuffing
• foam control and air release
• compatibility with non-metal components within the gearbox, including paint and seals.

These performance characteristics (and others) are codified within various stringent standards from OEMs or governmental agencies and national standards. In some cases, IGO products may need to meet more than 20 specifications, including those from major gearbox OEMs like Flender, SEW, Sumitomo, and ZF Industrial.

Performance meeting these standards is realized through the addition of chemical additives to the synthetic base stock. These additives ensure wear protection, corrosion protection, water shedding,  and foam control. Large advancements in antiwear chemistries have been made in recent years to ensure gearboxes are protected robustly against a multitude of possible failure mechanisms. In order to have a stable blend of polar chemical additives in a nonpolar synthetic base oil, a compatabilizing chemistry is also incorporated. The compatabilizer must not compromise the benefits of using a high-quality base oil, high-quality additives or compromise the kind of performance that plant teams depend on.