tips for deaerating turbine oil 1

[jbattershell]

In a lubrication system for gearing, the oil is often whipped up and aerated from the gear mesh. The oil tank is usually sized with baffles and such so that the entrained air has time to come to the top surface and "pop" so to speak and deareate the oil before the pump sucts the oil back for lubing the gears and bearings. I am looking for tips for speeding up this process so that the tank size could be reduced from a size of about 3 minutes retention to more like 1.5 minutes retetion.

 

[Romefu12]

jbattershell;
I am sure you can contact any of the leading oil manufacturers of Turbine oil like Shell, Mobil etc to help with the excessive foaming of your turbine oil. Standard turbine oil viscosity is usually ISO 46 depending on the ambient temperatures and the operating temperatures.

There is however 1 more thing you might want to consider with a gearbox application. In a gearbox application the sizing and baffling of the oil tank is used not only for dearating the oil, it also used to slow the oil flow and delay the time in which the oil can be scavenged from the tank and returned to the gear assembly for lubrication. This time allows particles such as heavy metals, component metals etc to settle out and fall to the bottom. This can be advantageous for performing oil analysis, condition monitoring of the gear box, and predictive maintenance of all components of the gearbox assembly. If you still choose to accelerate this process there are a few other ideas you may want to consider including the installing of magnets for particle capture, an online oil centrifuge for preventive maintenance, and a separate sampling line for oil analysis.

Kind Regards

Romefu12

 

[abeltio]

std practice in gas turbine world is to use a demister tank with fans that create slight vacuum inside the lube oil tank (about 4 to 6 in H2O). the demister's purpose is to remove the bubbles from the oil...
HTH

saludos.
a.

 

[jmw]

You may find some mpore discussion around this problem in this thread: javascriptpenindex(450,350,'

http://www.tipmaster.com/includes/refinfo.cfm?w=450&h=350')

 

[jmw]

Well, that didn't work out very well. I right-clicked the thread number and selected "copy shortcut"and imagine my surprise, it aint what i thought.
It is supposed to be the thread89-82329 in the Auto Lubricant forum, "Oil deaeration". There is another thread somewhere about removing bubbles in oil. If i can find it, i'll post it.

 

[jmw]

Ah! I need to copy the thread number! Well here is another thread in the Chemical Processing Forum: "Bubbles in oil" thread342-32850 .

 

[jbattershell]

Thanks for the tips.

I already was going to try the screening trick but I wanted to see if anyone else had experience with it. Thanks for confrimation.

Our gearbox will be under vacuum so that trick is covered also. Typically, our oil return will flow into the tank onto a angled baffle and the oil will slip into the tank below oil level so as not to entrain more air. In this new application, I plan on not having a large reservoir in comparision to the pump flow. Knowing that reduced oil tank size/dwell time will be against me, I will try to make up for it with the screen and carefull placement of the pump suction line. I will test this out to see if the percent air in oil is equal to or greater than when using the standard tank design. Thanks.