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The majority of mechanical failures are not obvious. They accrue gradually – by way of particulate buildup in a bearing race, a micro-fissure obscured by carbonized lubricants, a metal leaching process hidden in an acidic sludge no one was aware of. Precision cleaning doesn’t maintain appearances. It eliminates the root causes of ruin long before it becomes a choice.
Grime as an engineering problem
Contamination found on industrial equipment is not visible dirt; it’s metal swarf, airborne silica, and even carbon from the combustion process. These and other similar contaminants, when heated, become even more lethal to the operation. Heat generated by contaminates can be more damaging than mechanical wear, so it is crucial to get all the debris out of the unit. You need a clean machine to effectively check for other mechanical issues. A hot spot caused by contamination will be too close to the heat created by normal operation for other problems to be detected using infrared. This is because similar to friction-generated heat, infrared technology is based on heat differentials.
When cleaning your equipment, you do not want to just redistribute the contamination and debris, but instead remove it. This requires specialty cleaning, notably using the proper chemistry for both the substrates being cleaned (e.g. the part) and the contaminating substance.
The corrosion problem is mostly invisible
Corrosion in industrial settings usually isn’t detectable until it becomes structurally significant. Salt deposits from coastal or processing environments, acidic byproducts from chemical exposure, alkaline residues from cleaning processes that weren’t properly neutralised – these all continue to work on the metal surface, and are often most aggressive in the pockets of moisture trapped beneath the surface contaminant.
But cleaning off that layer of contamination isn’t the whole solution. There’s a chemical residue there that must be neutralised for a protective layer to properly bond. This is why Anti Corrosion Cleaning is its own process – not just getting rid of the chemical residue that salt leaves behind will produce a surface that corrosion inhibitors and lubricants will bond to rather than just sitting on a chemically reactive background. But it’s skipped surprisingly often. And it’s costly. A corrosion inhibitor sprayed over acid residue will certainly be less effective. But it probably won’t be any cheaper. It’ll just push the day you find out you have a problem a little further down the road.
Cleaning enables inspection
One of the benefits of having specialized cleaning schedules that people don’t talk about very often is that you can actually inspect a clean surface. This sounds obvious until you’ve tried to spot a hairline fracture under a centimeter of grease.
Ultrasonic testing, dye penetrant inspection, and visual checks for micro-cracking are all compromised by surface contamination. Companies that run clean equipment find defects earlier. Not because their equipment is failing more, but because the defects are visible.
Identifying a developing crack in a pump housing during a scheduled clean costs a fraction of what it costs when the housing fails under load. This is the connection between specialized cleaning and MTBF. Higher MTBF numbers don’t often come from better components. They frequently come from maintenance regimes that catch problems at the stage when repair is still cheap.
The shift from reactive to proactive maintenance
The proactive maintenance model has multiple indirect cost advantages over reactive maintenance (the fix-on-failure model). For example, consider cleaning and degreasing: if you wash machine tools and CNC machines every day, will they last longer and break down less often than if you clean them only when they stop working accurately or can’t be read? The answer is obvious, yet many manufacturers hang on to plant traditions that date back to when water was free and labour was cheap.
Postponing cleaning and degreasing in the false hope of cost savings does nothing to reduce costs, because dirt is an insidious thief of precision. It scratches and abrades way-grinding surfaces, puts friction on ways and bearings, and keeps master balls and rollers from performing as they should, steering precision alignment out of the most efficient zone. Meanwhile, dirt and dust cut the conveyor life and wear out brushes in spindle contact devices.
Getting the chemistry right
Finding the right cleaning methods depends on identifying the right level of cleanliness for your application and determining the most cost-effective way to achieve it. A method that does a very good job at removing all visible dirt, debris and stains from a surface might still leave an unacceptable residue of microscopic particles or molecular films.
