SKF RecondOil: Reliably Clean Oil as a Service

The search for a solution to lubrication oil challenges has led to a radical new approach for providing clean and reliable oil. SKF RecondOil offers “Oil as a service” to industrial customers looking for a holistic solution for providing their machines with oil that is reliably clean. But this technology is not simply “a better filter” as some might expect. SKF RecondOil is much more than a filter.

Using Double Separation Technology (DST), SKF RecondOil provides customers with reliably clean oil through a variety of delivery methods and can even extend the life of that oil indefinitely—well beyond its traditional “service life.”

As we know, clean oil is important for machine reliability (and dirty oil of course causes wear and premature machine failure), but without the right knowledge and tools, keeping your oil clean can be time-consuming and difficult.

Oil You Can Rely On

Part of the reason oil is hard to keep clean is that it degrades over time. For most facilities, this means old oil must be disposed of and new oil must be added. Each time industrial oil is changed, there are many associated costs and issues—not only related to the new oil itself, but also in the process of shipping, receiving, storing and transferring that oil in a way that keeps it clean, cool and dry.

In fact, the cost of the oil itself may be minimal compared to many of the “costs” associated with changing oil and controlling contamination properly (e.g., proper storage and transfer equipment, proper training, oil analysis costs etc.). Rather than tackling all that yourself, SKF RecondOil has created a holistic solution for ensuring your machines are always running with properly clean oil.

We often talk about machine reliability, but what if we thought about oil in a similar way? The power of the DST system is that it provides your machines with oil that is reliably clean. That reliability in the oil itself helps foster more reliable machines by controlling contamination and maintaining a level of cleanliness that fits your specific application and goals.

Even brand-new oil sent straight from the distributor is often not as clean as you think. Many plants have learned the hard way that “new” oil does not always mean clean oil. With DST, your oil becomes an ally in reliability that you can count on rather than the site of an ongoing contamination problem.

How Does It Work?

DST is a patented two-stage combination of chemical and mechanical filtration that removes particles—all the way down to nano-size particles—without damaging oils or their additives. The technology uses principles originally developed in the world of biochemistry, which have been adapted by SKF RecondOil for industrial applications. At its heart is a special separation booster chemical that is added to the contaminated oil in precisely metered amounts.

Under carefully controlled conditions, the booster acts like a chemical magnet, attracting particles (including nano particles), water molecules and degraded additives and causing them to coalesce into larger clusters. These eventually settle out of the oil and are extracted from the bottom of a reaction chamber as a concentrated contaminant sludge. In the second stage of the DST process, the oil is passed through a specialized mechanical filtration system that extracts any remaining separation booster, leaving ultra-clean oil ready for re-use.

What Options Are Available with DST?

Because each customer has different machines with different configurations and needs, SKF RecondOil offers customers a wide range of customization options in delivering “Oil as a service.”

The system can be set up in a variety of different ways. It can be integrated with machines for continuous filtration, used to process oil in batches, or delivered in a hybrid solution that combines multiple methods of delivering reliably clean oil to your machines.

Double Separation Technology from SKF RecondOil has helped a growing list of manufacturing companies to change the way they think about changing oil and especially about costs associated with changing metal working oils or controlling contamination. From a costly and environmentally unfriendly burden, DST transforms oil into a sustainable, reliable partner that can boost process performance, improve stability and cut costs.