Keywords
Citation
Taylor, J. (2000), "Comment and opinion", Industrial Lubrication and Tribology, Vol. 52 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilt.2000.01852baa.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2000, MCB UP Limited
Comment and opinion
Keywords: Bearings, Railway flange lubricants, Greases
In this issue is part 2 of the series of papers concerning the grease lubrication of railway wagon bearings. In this part Jan Lundberg and Sven Berg provide the results of their work in attempting correlation between standard laboratory tests and the performance of greases in "real" applications.
This type of work is of very great importance to the grease industry in general. For far too long now greases have been produced and purchased against the results of laboratory tests which some here doubted actually predict service performance. It is easy to have doubts but it is only with a large-scale investigation such as that reported here that we could become more "technically" aware of our test method failings. It will be interesting to know of any other modern studies in progress that will actually help in the creation of improved relevant laboratory tests for greases.
The paper from the Indian School of Mines covers the subject of ensuring that the maximum life is obtained from a charge of lubricating oil. They have developed data to support the correlation between an FTIR method and the more traditional tests used to assess lube oil condition. This is of course a very interesting proposal as only a very small amount of the used oil is needed and the test itself is far quicker than the general standard tests that can be replaced.
Members of the Government College of Engineering at Pune in India have produced an outstanding paper that will be of great interest to those designers involved with high-speed aerostatic aerodynamic bearings. They have mathematically modelled a typical bearing and demonstrated agreement between the model and experimental data in some major parameter areas. This area of bearing research is one where there has been little published research in recent years. The authors are to be congratulated on their contribution and encouraged to progress further with their fundamental development of our understanding of high-speed bearings.
John Taylor