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Is Turbine Flush Justified?
Bill Jacobyansky, Maintenance Manager, Guardian
Industries
It is true that the strainer baskets in lube oil systems will
catch any of the particles that have the ability to create a catastrophic
problem if they were allowed to re circulate. This would lead
me to minimize the detrimental effect of the paint chips and babbit
that are currently known to be in the lines.
Because of the flow capacity that turbine oil systems have to
maintain the filtration isn't perfect and small particles will
get through causing future bearing damage. Knowing that the bearings
have already been damaged previously in a fire would lead me to
plan to have them rebabbitted anyway during the next Maintenance
outage.
Therefore I have no worries that the current contamination in
the return lines is going to cause me any additional expense over
what I was already planning to do.
A boroscope inspection is nice, but before I make my final decision
I want to know what the condition of the oil is. I would hope
that there would be time to get at least two oil samples to give
me an indication of the oil quality and whether or not the particle
counts are increasing or not.
I would also like to get an idea about the viability of the
additive package - one oil sample would be good enough to get
me that information. If a decision has to be made before I have
time to get any sampling results my decision would be to cooperate
with operations and not perform the flush until the next Maintenance
outage.
See other responses
to this Readers Challenge.
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