Does anyone have any information on cost savings for doing oil analysis, verses run to failure.

Well I can only give you anecdotal evidence for this topic. At a site that I worked at for 7 years until last September, we were performing in house oil analysis on a lot of our equipment. We had an estimate from Mobil to take over our oil program for the cost of about $36.00/sample. This was for about 100 samples per month. While we did not really track our in house cost, we thought it would be more than $36 each. When we looked at the costs, we decided to limit our oil sampling to those pieces of equipment that had either very large quantities of oil, were very difficult to shut down to change oil or had manufacturer warranty requirements to sample oil. Hope this helps.

I did oil analysis at a plant I worked at before and the cost saving was very high as opposed to run to failure, gear box's on bottleneck equipment, from the sample taken it was ditermined what type of material it was and parts ordered, before break down happens.

Simple:

Lets take a piece of equipment, let say a generator.

Sample Analysis $36.00

Estimated running hours 6000 hrs/year
Sample every 500 hrs
Cost 12 x $36.00 = $432/year

Other info:
New generator $200.000
Scheduled overhaul $30.000 (of course depending were in the world), the wages are higher in the USA.

Unscheduled overhaul $60.000

Run to failure:
Investing $432 a year could prevent embursing $200.000 to replace a broken piece of equipment.

Here is an article on PdM Cost Benefit Analysis. It includes a sample calculation for oil analysis. Hope that is helpful; contact me if you have any questions.

Rich Wurzbach

http://www.mrgcorp.com/white_papers.asp?aID=182

Yes, there are definite savings to be attained by and effective oil analysis program depending on the type of equipment and the operating environment. The more costly your downtime is and the more expensive rebuilds and replacements the greater the return on your investment. There are some case studies posted on www.dingo.com. Good luck.