Today’s manufacturing environments place great strain on production machinery. In the drive to maximise productivity, quality and throughput, users demand equipment that can generate ever larger forces with ever more precision. The elimination of process steps in sheet metal production, for example, calls for larger press tools and, in turn, more powerful presses. In mining and construction, higher equipment capacity is essential to minimise the time and labour costs in earth and spoil moving operations. Tighter tolerances and the desire to minimise or eliminate secondary finishing operations, meanwhile, require equipment that can operate with extreme precision.
Commercial demands serve to compound these challenges. Operators want machines that will operate faster to reduce part cycle times. They also want to maximise the overall availability of equipment, by running production lines for longer, by implementing rapid, automated changeovers between parts and by extending the intervals between maintenance interventions. Above all, they do not want unplanned downtime caused by equipment failure. With many operations involving multiple items of equipment, economic production requires every piece to run at extremely high levels of reliability.
Hydraulic technology remains a supremely effective way of generating large forces at acceptable speeds, using proven equipment that operates with high reliability under demanding conditions. Nevertheless, hydraulic technology can in some applications have certain important vulnerabilities. For example, during operation and maintenance, hydraulic fluid can pick up contamination in the form of dirt, water and wear particles. Over time, this contamination can cause severe damage to seals, pumps, cylinders, valves and other components, degrading performance and ultimately leading to catastrophic failure. Such failures are not only expensive to fix, they also have the potential to disrupt production cycles. In many modern production environments, the combination of extended operating periods and fast cycle times serves to increase the risk of hydraulic fluid contamination and damage, with industry estimates that over 85% of all hydraulic system failures can be attributed to fluid contamination.
Read more: Hydraulic fluids: Controlling contamination in hydraulic fluids