Marine

Machine condition monitoring based on oil analysis has become an important, if not mandatory, maintenance practice by the marine industry. An effective oil analysis program will keep important assets such as engines, gearboxes, hydraulic systems, turbines, compressors, generators and any other oil-wetted machinery in operation by reducing unexpected failures and costly unscheduled down time.

Spectro Scientific has supplied analytical instruments to the marine industry throughout the world to enhance existing oil analysis programs. The nature of the industry makes it impractical to send samples to on-shore laboratories, therefore an onboard oil and/or fuel analysis capability may be a prerequisite. We welcome the opportunity to continue to be of service to existing customers and to assist new customers with their oil analysis instrumentation requirements.

Challenges

Being at sea for long periods of time makes the use of on-shore oil analysis labs impractical for marine vessels. By the time results are received back on board the equipment being analyzed might have failed already.

Spectro Scientific offers a set of solutions to transform the vessel owner’s onboard oil analysis program. As instrumentation size decreases and becomes more portable, oil analysis devices are now being put in the hands of the end user. It has been proven that these new smaller devices do not sacrifice analytical performance. This brings the end user closer to the vessel and its problems, enabling time-sensitive, critical decision making.

Cold Corrosion- Large, two-stroke diesel engines are used in over 30,000 ships worldwide. Due to over lubrication, they waste in excess of US$2 billion of cylinder oil every year.  This creates more than 1.25 million tons of contaminated drain oil that needs proper disposal. This over-lubrication in slow speed, two-stroke marine diesel engines can cost ship managers and owners more than $100,000 per year per ship.

Cylinder under-lubrication leads to cold corrosion and early failure of expensive engine components like pistons, piston rings and cylinder liners. Careful monitoring of cylinder oil BN allows the operator to use enough oil to prevent cold corrosion without wasting valuable oil and additives.

• Recommended by the engine designer
• Allows quick adjustment of cylinder oil lubrication rates when entering or leaving Sulfur Emission Control Areas.
• Battery powered portable analyzer can be carried to the test site rather than having to send oil samples back to a central laboratory
• FluidScan software can store up to 5000 measurement results and export these results by .csv file.
• This allows the operator to track and store measurements by cylinder for their records and enables trending of measurements.
• Upgradeable software allows the user to monitor lubricating oil condition on a wide variety of shipboard equipment. The FluidScan Q1230 can monitor lubricating oils for TAN, TBN, oxidation, sulfation, water and soot.
• Cold corrosion is best avoided by tightly controlling BN using a simple, easy to use, accurate analyzer like the FluidScan 1200. Measuring corrosive iron is UNNECESSARY if you properly control residual cylinder oil BN and never let it fall below 15 (Wärtsilä recommended limit).
• See Wärtsilä Services technical bulletin RT-161.