LubeWear – True Wear Metal Analysis from Oil Analysis Laboratories

Ordinary labs instruments and methods cannot see the large wear particles.

Ordinary Oil Analysis cannot see particles bigger than a red blood cell.

LubeWear can see through the fog of small particles and detect every single particle big or small.

Award winning

Award winning technology seen regularly on TV and in the news

LubeWear Acid Digestion – An Award winning Technology

LubeWear is the winner of prestigious accolades such as the the industry leading condition monitoring innovation award, has been referenced in text books and was featured on National Geographic channel for its ground breaking technology. Since it's invention in 2018 has literally changed the way machinery failures are detected and prevented. LubeWear is a revolutionary new way to measure wear metals in oil samples to predict failures far in advance of traditional oil analysis technologies. This is because although normal wear metal analysis is great at seeing small normal wear particles, it misses every particle larger than 5 microns. This is a major problem, because it is the big ones that matter - as they indicate a problem is occurring.

"Normal elemental analysis cannot detect particles larger than a human red blood cell. This means it fails to catch 2 out of 3 normal wear particles and any abnormal wear particles. LubeWear catches all of them helping prevent failures other laboratories miss!"

To give you an idea of how tiny the particles are that we are talking about, then first consider the width of a human hair is about 80 microns in size. Normal Wear particles are classed as particles less than 15 microns or one 5th the width of a human hair. This is still far too big for normal oil analysis and you have to go 3 times smaller again to less than 5 microns before you get accurate wear metals by traditional oil analysis. A human red blood cell is actually bigger than this at 6 microns. This means two thirds of the size range for normal wear are missed and all the abnormal wear particles are missed by traditional oil analysis wear metal testing.

Looking at the diagram below, a human hair has been closely magnified to give you the context of the particle sizes. Everything within the green ring would be considered normal wear, but only the 4 micron particle would be accurately detected and the others would be underrepresented in traditional oil analysis. The method called LubeWear developed by Oil Analysis Laboratories solves this problem.

Hydraulic iso code

To explain this best let's look at a real world example. Let's say you were asked to count people standing on a beach on holiday and report back whether the beach was busy or not. That may seem simple, but let's say for some reason you could only see people under the height of 1 metres (~3ft). You would see a beach full of short people with no tall people. Trying to work out the total number of people on the beach would be difficult. You could guess based on a normal distribution of short to tall that if around 7% of the UK population are under 1 metres then 93% are likely to be over that height and extrapolate from there. This is how normal oil analysis wear metal analysis works; it is based on the assumption of a certain percentage of small particles compared to large, but this assumes a perfect normal distribution. However when abnormal wear takes place it skews the normal distribution.

"Imagine trying to count all the people - when you are blind to anyone over 1 metres (~3ft), metaphorically that is what traditional wear metal analysis is trying to do - and why you should be using LubeWear."

If we return to our beach example, lets say a coach full of professional basket ball players (known for being tall) came for the day we will totally underestimate the population of the beach, whilst if a pre-school outing went to the beach we could over estimate the number of people on the beach. In wear metals terms this is the same as missing a failure, or causing a false alarm. Both are equally costly - in both time and money - and all based on a method that is just a best guess of the total wear present. LubeWear, by contrast, has no such restrictions and can accurately detect and report the true amount of wear in the sample regardless of the particle size.

"Traditional Oil Analysis is only guessing at the total amount of wear metals, LubeWear gives you the true picture."

A real example of how poor traditional elemental analysis is compared to LubeWear is shown below. On the right hand side is shown a photograph of the view from underneath of a sample received for analysis. As you can see, there is grit debris at the bottom, which has caused wear metal particles also evident. The sample was analysed by both traditional wear element analysis and the LubeWear technique. LubeWear accurately detected the metallic particles within the sample, but the traditional elemental analysis missed the majority of these particles, giving the impression of a better machine condition than the true situation.

LubeWear has received a lot of recognition for its groundbreaking technology in wear analysis including being presented at international conferences, in industry media as well as first being featured on television in 2020 with the show Car SOS - search for the Mitsubishi Evo episode of season 8 if you are a fan. Since this time LubeWear has saved countless machines by identifying wear early to prevent failure. Read on to find out more about the science behind LubeWear.

As Seen On TV

Read the full article featured on Learn Oil Analysis Here.

"LubeWear is the biggest leap forward in oil condition monitoring for a generation. It will save machinery owner's thousands of £££s, in lost production and maintenance costs."

Bob Cutler - Inventor of LubeWear technology.

The standard and most common procedure to measure wear metals in used lubricants is by inductively couple plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES), although the rotating disc, Atomic Absorption (AA) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) techniques are still used in the industry for this purpose.

ICP requires the sample to be diluted in a solvent, typically white spirits (household paint thinners). Then this solution is sprayed into an argon plasma, which looks like a standard Bunsen burner flame.

The sprayed sample is resident in the flame for about 1 or 2 seconds, after which it flows to waste.

During this time the wear metal particles – together with any solubilised oil additive elements are heated to over 5000 Celsius. The heat energy absorbed during this period is then immediately emitted. The wavelength of the energy emitted from each type of wear metal present is specific to that one specific metal type, e.g. copper or tin. Hence each metal type can be detected and its concentration measured by identifying the specific wavelength and intensity of the light emitted associated with that metal.

The problems with standard ICP techniques lie with the size of the metal particles present in the sample.

Firstly, consider the diameter of human hair, which is about 70 to 80 microns and that the human eye can only see particles greater than 40 microns.

Then consider all particles in an oil sample less than 5 microns are the only ones completely energised. Current ICP-OES methods only identify and accurately measure concentrations of wear metals present in the sample less than 5 microns*.

*Note: wear metals can vary in size from less than 1 micron to more than 1 mm, so only a small proportion of the wear is actually detected with traditional ICP-OES.

However, particles greater than 5 microns are too big to be completely energised in the short residence time they remain in the argon plasma. The larger the particle - the worse the problem gets.

If you can see particles (>40 microns) - then the ICP spectrometer cannot measure the whole particle – it passes through the heat source too quickly to be energised completely. So just a fraction of each large particle is energised - detected and quantified. This means the results offered by all standard Oil Condition Monitoring (OCM)  laboratories never provide the true concentration of wear metals present in the sample. They simply quote whatever their ICP measures – the concentration of particles present <5 microns and fractions of those larger. This has never been considered a serious problem - as the interpretation of the data compares changes in concentrations of the small particles in the current sample and the previous sample, rather than comparing true concentrations of wear metals between current and previous samples. Nevertheless, when true data is required, the problem has traditionally been overcome using an expensive procedure, involving burning the oil to produce an ash, dissolving the ash in mineral acids, and spraying the resultant aqueous solution into an argon plasma. The cost of the process being far too expensive to offer in a routine OCM programme. That is until now – 2018, when the Oil Analysis Laboratories (OAL) R&D team developed a procedure to overcome this long standing dilemma.

"We could not settle for the status quo when customers machinery was failing. For us, Failure really was not an option. Hence, we developed a company with For when failure is not an option as our mission statement"

Adam Cutler - Oil Analysis Laboratories

Why? Because the OAL R&D team could not settle for the status quo – could not settle for second best, knowingly reporting approximate data only. So challenged themselves to solve this long standing problem and successfully achieved this once impossible task. OAL now offers OCM with the true concentration of wear metals present in used lubricants as standard and at no extra cost.

Why? Because clients benefit from knowing the true concentration of wear metals present and not just what traditional OCM laboratories have always offered - merely the amount present less than 5 microns and a bit more, if any large particles are present. This allows Oil Companies and Engineering Research Centres - together with current OCM clients in general industry - to work with true wear metal data - at a price and turnaround time they have become accustomed. Enabling the whole industry world-wide to move into the 21st Century and develop ever increasing better products and profits, as a consequence of working with true data.

Incredulously, the OAL R&D team has gone further - and developed a separate technique to produce true wear-metal value for grease samples too. No longer will it be necessary to receive grease sample reports showing ICP values of 5% solutions of the grease samples or erroneously normalised values to represent 100% true values. Why are some of the results erroneous? Because all the data has simply been multiplied by 20 - including multiplying and exaggerating the erroneous background noise values and reporting them all as true data. Why has the lab multiplied the background values too? Because there is no way the analyst knows which values obtained are noise and which are true. They use the usual get out scheme - quote 5% solution values as obtained off the ICP spectrometer and leave the client to choose which are true and which are not.

Again the OAL R&D team have successfully overcome this problem - to give clients true wear-metal and additive elements values in grease samples at the standard price and standard turnaround time clients have become accustomed.

At Oil Analysis Laboratories we make a bold claim and that is we will run a side by side trial of traditional elemental analysis techniques vs LubeWear on every sample. You actually get two results quoted on your report for each wear element so can see the difference between the two tests. If the values are approximately the same you know the particles are predominantly normal size, but if there is a large increase in the LubeWear value compared to the traditional elemental analysis data you know there is a high percentage of large sized particles, which indicates abnormal wear is taking place in the machinery under investigation.

Below are some case studies from various applications of how LubeWear has highlighted abnormal wear earlier than other labs. Of note is how we managed to identify faults on the first sample and not waiting have to wait for a trend to be established first. Equally of note is just how much more sensitive LubeWear is at detecting abnormal wear compared to the traditional elemental analysis. In each case LubeWear correctly identified the fault before the traditional methods and as well avoided a false alarm too.

What Next?

If you truly care about having more reliable and safer machinery then you need LubeWear. LubeWear is exclusive to Oil Analysis Laboratories, so why not email or call us today by clicking the blue speech bubble symbol at the bottom right of this page.

LubeWear technology is built into every sample and is so fantastic at detecting wear metals we haven't needed to update the method, but we don't stop there in trying to help our customers. We have been inventing some of our own new analyses called LubeWear Vision, which gives a snapshot view of 1ml of your oil on the very worst condition samples. This is included for free on samples our diagnosticians think would benefit from it automatically without even asking. However, we have also developed LubeWear 3D, which this little video below will give you a taste of this service you can enquire about...