Raise a glass to automated lubrication

According to the US Brewers’ Association, almost 20% of sales from craft brewers in that country are made up of seasonal beers, and it is during the five months from July to November that almost 60% of such beers are typically sold. Here in the UK, SIBA (the Society of Independent Brewers) has reported steady growth in capital equipment investment by the sector, with one out of six breweries planning to double current levels of production, sales and turnover by the end of 2018.

Unplanned maintenance events can have a significant impact on brewers attempting to meet these new market dynamics, particularly the seasonal variations in demand and the steady growth in consumption predicted by the trade bodies. So, how best to minimise incidences of disruptive downtime that could so easily threaten the fortunes of a brewer operating in this very competitive market?

Precise and timely lubrication is the key to keeping modern plant and factory equipment running reliably and at peak efficiencies. But this poses a very practical problem: a modern brewery filling line will have multiple lubrication points and this can present a variety of challenges for maintenance staff armed simply with manual grease guns. Difficult-to access lubrication points are either missed, or inappropriate quantities of lubricant may be applied, leading to over- or under-lubrication. Respectively, these actions result in lubricant egress from bearing seals and consequent contamination of the production environment, or lubricant starvation leading to premature bearing failure; production will suffer as a result.

The German family-owned Erdinger Weißbräu brewery took the decision to adopt automatic lubrication of new filling line equipment when it undertook a major plant modernisation project. With more than 3000 lubrication points to service, manual methods were rejected in favour of an alternative zoned automated lubrication system, which would not only increase system availability, but also reduce lubricant consumption through higher lubricant metering precision.

The system Erdinger chose for the new lines was SKF’s Lincoln EDL1 (Electric Driven Lubricator 1), in an arrangement comprising 90 sections with three electrically powered piston pumps feeding thousands of lubrication points along the main filling lines. The piston pumps are supplied via filling pumps from grease reservoirs or, alternatively, from pressurised grease cartridges and are capable of generating outlet pressures of up to 280bar from an inlet pressure of just 2bar, enabling even the furthest points in the line, such as the shipping bay, to be reached with ease.

The piston pump comes with an integrated control board that manages the lubrication cycle based on pre-set time intervals or signals generated by a separate condition monitoring system. Up to three EDL1 units can be managed via an SKF LMC301 controller to enable lubricant delivery in applications where the lubrication requirements or operating cycles differ significantly in different parts of a plant.

A key advantage of the EDL1 system is its acceptance of low delivery pressures, meaning it can be installed at the end of long lubricant feed lines or as an extension to existing centralised lubrication systems, without the need to upgrade distribution pumps or delivery pipework.

In new installations, this reduced distribution pressure requirement can dramatically simplify system design, allowing high-pressure dual-line systems to be replaced with a simpler, lower pressure single-line configuration. Now that’s something to raise a glass to this summer!