Service app for open gears

Sibelco Europe is one of the customers who appreciate the FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR. Sibelco Europe’s business activities revolve around the mining and sale of quartz at its site in Dessel, Belgium. There are currently 5 horizontal mills and 2 rotary kilns in operation. A FUCHS LUBRITECH Application Engineer made his first visit to the company in May 2015 and checked the condition of the plants as part of basic service by performing temperature and vibration measurements. Optimization potential which could be exploited by successfully switching to the FUCHS adhesive lubricant CEPLATTYN quickly became evident. The combination of the FUCHS LUBRITECH service and the use of CEPLATTYN made significant progress in operation – reduced vibrations, an optimized wear pattern and reduced lubricant consumption. These improvement measures were not only documented by the ideal service documentation in the FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR, but also graphically prepared.

For more than a decade, FUCHS LUBRITECH in Kaiserslautern has been relying on this special documentation platform that is constantly optimized. “With the FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR, the digital age is now also advancing in the servicing of open gears, which are used primarily in mining, the cement industry, but also in the chemical and ceramics industries,” says Karin Simonis, Assistant Head of Technical Service, who looks after the FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR from Kaiserslautern. “Already during the inspection by FUCHS LUBRITECH’s application engineer, the results can be entered into the database via a tablet, and the complete report is available to the customers in digital form immediately after completion of the service – around the clock, anywhere in the world.”

The FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR app displays at a glance the current machine report and status, which is displayed as a traffic light system. Not only customers but also other application engineers are able to view machine developments from the history that is also accessible. This is particularly interesting if the extent to which the optimization potential can be exploited and demonstrated after maintenance measures have been carried out as part of an extended service or lubricant change. Photos, videos and infrared images are also directly available, as are graphical representations. All in all, the FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR features four menu options, including the “News” section, which will also be increasingly used in the future for information from FUCHS that is of general interest.

“In the past, the previously developed photos had to be inserted into manually created reports and sent to the customer. Today this information is available immediately at a central location, and our customers appreciate that,” explains Stefan Hoffmann, Service Engineer at FUCHS LUBRITECH GmbH. “Important values such as the temperatures of the tooth flanks or the vibration behavior of the gear wheels are also shown chronologically in trend diagrams.” Furthermore, the printing and sending of reports in paper form and the associated delays have largely become a thing of the past, which is also good for the environment. 

“The inspections of open gears are particularly important because they require very high investments,” explains Karin Simonis. The FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR currently lists over 6,600 machines from around 2,260 plants. Many customers have already registered and can now see the results of the inspections carried out online: “It is sufficient to send us a completed registration form. We verify the authorization and then send the login data promptly. The FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR is gaining popularity thanks to the application engineers who emphasize the advantages of the service and through word-of-mouth propaganda among customers, at conferences or during one of our ACADEMIES, for example.” The FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR is already available in nine languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. A secure cloud solution has been chosen to store the data.

An extension of the application possibilities is currently being considered. “In Australia, our technicians are now being trained to check the condition of dragline excavators,” reports Stefan Hoffmann. “The FUCHS LUBRICANTS INSPECTOR would also be a great help here.”

Lubricants. Technology. People. – today and in the future.