Lube oil contamination is one of the fastest ways to get into trouble in the engine room, and engineers monitor their oil closely for signs of problems. But it's hard to catch everything without a lab on board - at least, until recently. Castrol has come up with a new solution, SmartMonitor, that regularly checks the oil's properties and lets the crew (and shore staff) know about any developing issues. To find out more, TME caught up with Castrol Technical Service Manager, Are Sletten, who has been working with the product throughout early trials.
Just for background, what's the standard process for analyzing engine oil?
What happens normally on board the vessel is that an engineer takes a physical oil sample in a bottle and repeats the process once every three months. They will ship it to the laboratory. It takes two to three weeks before you get a reply, because it takes time for shipping and there is processing time at the lab. And then it will be checked and the results will be sent.
How does Castrol's new equipment do it differently?
The SmartMonitor unit will give you the same information as a lab report, but every hour. It will automatically take a sample from the main engine, run it through the unit, and then drain it back into the engine.
SmartMonitor will give you the total base number, viscosity, oxidation, and water content, when used in an engine application. There is a display on the unit that the engineer can have a look at to see if everything is okay, but the unit also feeds data up to the cloud, and then the customers on shore can go into our website and view the results. They have access to the graphs, the trends, the alarm limits, and all of that. So, if you want to go back and see if something happened last week, you could go back and see the trend.
What can this help prevent? How does it save the operator money?
It's sort of like insurance: you might not need it, but in the event you do, then it will more than pay for itself. First, if you detect any water early, that's very valuable because of the damage that water ingress can do to an engine. The second most important factor is viscosity, especially when customers are considering new fuels. Fuel oil is always affecting the lube oil in the engine. In this time when people are testing biofuels, ammonia and methanol, having this on board is a valuable way to make sure that the fuel is not causing problems.
For example, if there is a little bit of methanol fuel getting into the engine oil, the viscosity will go down, and then you lose your lubrication. If you lose the lubrication film, you might end up with bearing damage. This unit will tell you instantly if viscosity is going down and of course it has a low-level alarm to alert the engineers. At the same time, company managers on shore can get the alert via email or on the phone as a text message.
Even if you're not paying attention, it's watching the engine every hour. It's a huge help for inexperienced engineers, and it takes a bit of stress off for senior engineers as well.
Do you have any early success stories?
We have done trials for several years and we have prevented engine damage. With one customer, the unit gave an alert that there was water in the engine oil. The engineers thought it was a faulty sensor and believed the unit was wrong, but we asked them to check anyways. They found that there was water in the oil, and because our SmartMonitor caught it early, they were able to fix the problem at lower cost. The customer then bought several more of our SmartMonitor units for their other vessels.
-TME
