THE OIL-PLUS™ SYSTEM

The Oil-Plus system is a machinery health monitoring program. It is an enhanced oil analysis procedure that provides automatic surveillance of machinery health conditions and is designed to prevent serious equipment damage or major mechanical failures, reducing overall workload and maintenance costs.

Oil-Plus is a software package that controls the operation of the workstations in the laboratories. It consists of a number of generic programs which are integrated into a powerful operating system resident on a PC that controls spectrometer operation, communicates with a mainframe database, and performs interpretation of data through an expert system. The main modules of the software package are spectrometer operational control, data collection and data reduction systems for AE and FTIR spectrometers, and diagnostic and trend analysis systems that perform automated fault analyses on spectrometric and physical property test data from machine fluids, and a terminal emulator program that allows communication between the PC and the mainframe computers.

Each workstation consists of an Atomic Emission (AE) Spectrometer for analysing wear metal content, additive system components, and contaminants of the oil samples, and a Fourier Transform Infra Red (FTIR) Spectrometer for measuring the physical conditions and other contaminants of the oil samples. Two high speed PC's contain the Oil-Plus software and are networked together for integrated operation.

The oil samples received from clients are identified with a unit number and sample date, which is entered into the Oil-Plus system through one of the PC=s. The PC communicates this information to the mainframe computer which then downloads a partial history of the units to be tested to the PC where it is stored temporarily.

Spectrometric data is obtained by burning the oil sample in the AE Spectrometer. This data is temporarily stored in the PC and is also transmitted to the mainframe. The oil physical parameters are measured by the FTIR Spectrometer and are also temporarily stored in the PC and transmitted to the mainframe computer. The information stored on the PC, along with the matching history, the identifying profile for each unit, and the relevant lubricating oil specification, is passed through the expert system where a trend analysis is performed and a recommendation report is produced. The report displays the unit condition, trends, parameters that are outside limits, and identifies problems that need to be addressed.

The system identifies four categories of machinery condition. They are "Normal", meaning no apparent problems, "Abnormal", which indicates a minor problem that can be left until the next inspection, "Critical", showing a serious problem that needs immediate attention, and "Destructive", which means the equipment is in a catastrophic state and must be shut down at once.