2019 Lubrication Guide

Few parts of a manufacturing plant are untouched by some form of lubrication products—from bearings and gears to motors and drives. Finding the right products for these diverse applications fall to the consultative work of the maintenance teams and the lubrication suppliers. They work in concert to deliver the right solutions and identify new breakthroughs in lubrications – and in component materials – to help deliver uncompromising uptime.

The 2019 Plant Engineering Lubrication Guide, sponsored by Lubriplate and prepared in partnership with the Society for Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers (STLE), offers a snapshot at some of these innovations for
oils and greases that help keep manufacturing plants humming along. The guide also is designed to provide manufacturers with an understanding of all of the market options available.

To call lubrication the life-blood of manufacturing is almost a cliché, but it’s also very true. The costs of any lubricant always must be considered in the context of the costs of downtime and safety. We do consider what
happens when lubricants fail, often because they were not properly monitored or measured. We don’t always look at a catastrophic failure in a gearbox or motor from the issue of safety, but if workers are in the area when these failures occur, employee injury is a real possibility.

The continuing partnership between the manufacturers and the lubrication suppliers – and working in consort with organizations such as STLE, which provide the technical research and in-depth analysis of industrial needs – keeps these issues at the forefront of any preventive maintenance programs. As sensors become more attuned to the issues of gear-based systems, this data will also better inform the plant maintenance team to potential issues before they become a productivity or safety issue.

We thank all of our partners on this year’s Lubrication Guide, including the companies that submitted their materials for consideration, and we hope our readers find the content useful.

Click here to download the 2019 Lubrication Guide