If you have an outage in a turbine and your lube oil pumps are locked out, be sure to turn off the tank heaters. Most heaters and RTD temperature probes are located in two different places that heat and read flowing oil. This can result in over-cooking the oil in the non-flowing/heated area. (Jody James, PdM Technician, Cleco)

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From the "The Practical Handbook of Machinery Lubrication"

Multigrade oils are made by blending a low viscosity oil with special additives called viscosity index improvers. For example, when these polymer additives are blended in the correct proportion with an SAE 15W oil, the oil flows like an SAE 15W oil at low temperatures and like an SAE 40 oil at high temperatures. The result is an SAE 15W/40 oil that will provide wide protection over an extended temperature range.

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There are plenty of potential benefits of using synthetic oil instead of mineral oil, but that doesn't mean that synthetics are necessarily better. In this article, Machinery Lubrication magazine author Jarrod Potteiger discusses the pro's and con's of using various synthetic lubricants.
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