Over the years, I’ve seen my share of lubrication-related failures, and a surprising number of them turn into full-blown investigations. Bearings don’t just fail, as Jim Fitch likes to say; they’re murdered. When failures happen, we’re left standing in the middle of a crime scene trying to figure out who did it, how, and why.
In my experience, the trickiest cases often come from compressors. People tend to lump “lubrication failure” into one generic bucket, but in compressor systems the chemistry, the gas interactions, and the failure modes can get complex fast. If you don’t treat these situations like an actual investigation (with preserved evidence, proper analysis, and identifying the right suspects) you’re basically trying to play Clue with half the cards missing.
Compressor Lubricants Don’t Play by Standard Rules
When most people think industrial lubricants, they picture mineral oils and traditional additive packages. Compressor lubricants live in a different world. You see far more synthetics, more exotic additive chemistry, and a major wildcard: the gas being compressed.
Air compressors are pretty straightforward: watch out for oxidation and keeps its causes (moisture, heat, air ingression and wear metals) in check. But when you move into process gas or refrigeration compressors, the gas can dramatically alter the behavior of the lubricant. It doesn’t just sit above the oil; it dissolves into it, reacts with it, or changes its viscosity right under your nose.
One of my earliest investigations involved a flare gas compressor at a refinery. This was a flooded screw compressor, so the gas and oil mixed intimately during operation. The plant was using a mineral-based circulating oil. Under normal circumstances, that might’ve been fine. But in this case, the gas was a mix of hydrocarbons and some hydrogen sulfide.
Those hydrocarbons dissolved into the mineral oil and sent the viscosity through the floor. The plant was dumping hundreds of gallons of oil into this machine just to keep it alive. They thought the compressor had “lubrication problems.” What it really had was a chemistry problem.
Switching from mineral oil to a polyalkylene glycol (PAG) base oil solved the solubility issue almost immediately. The oil held its viscosity, the lubricity stayed at an appropriate level, and the drain intervals were stretched out to three or four times the previous length.
That’s when it clicked for me: If the root cause is chemical, the solution must be chemical. If the root cause is design, the solution must be design. If it’s physical contamination, the solution has to be physical. Calling something a “lubrication failure” doesn’t tell you anything useful. You’ve got to identify the real culprit.
When the Clues All Look the Same
One reason these cases get so tricky is that very different failure modes can still produce nearly identical symptoms. Increased viscosity and higher acid numbers? Sure, that could be oxidation. But depending on the system, it could also come from contaminants breaking down, additives depleting, multiple contaminants interacting with each other, or combinations of all the above.
Sometimes the lab report practically screams “simple oxidation,” and Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest explanation is the right one. Most of the time, if you hear hoofbeats, you assume a horse is coming. But compressors introduce enough atypical variables that sometimes the “horse” you’re expecting to turn the corner turns out to be a zebra instead.
This is where people hesitate. They’re reluctant to go beyond the standard test slate, even when deeper tests—like RULER for antioxidant health, RPVOT, MPC testing, or FTIR analysis—might be the only way to reveal what’s actually happening.
Basic analysis is good, but harder failures require you to use more investigative tools.
The Refrigeration Lesson I Took Too Long to Learn
Before I came to Noria, I worked with refrigeration compressors, many of them running ester-based lubricants. Esters are great performers, but they’re notorious for hydrolyzing in the presence of water. Once hydrolysis starts, acidity increases, the oil breaks down, and everything spirals.
Here’s the embarrassing part: we didn’t check for water as part of our regular inspections.
We just kept changing the oil, swapping filters, and running clay treatments with Fuller's Earth. The symptoms were obvious, but the cause wasn’t even on our radar because the water level wasn’t high enough to be visibly noticeable.
We had the evidence the whole time; we just didn’t recognize it. That disconnect between field knowledge and actual lubricant behavior is one of the biggest reasons lubrication failures become a chronic problem.
Why So Many Cases Go Cold
The biggest obstacle I see in plants isn’t technical, it’s cultural.
Most facilities operate under a “get it running” mindset. There’s downtime pressure. There’s production pressure. As soon as a machine fails, everyone wants to get it back online.
That’s usually when the important evidence disappears.
Someone drains the oil. Someone throws away the filter. Someone wipes down the parts. Suddenly, you’ve lost the very clues that could’ve solved the case.
It doesn’t hurt to pull a sample and hold onto it. It doesn’t hurt to keep the filter. It doesn’t hurt to bag and tag a suspect component. If you don’t need it later, fine—throw it away. But if you do, you’ve preserved important context and saved yourself weeks of guesswork.
Think of it like a CSI episode: the last thing anyone would do is dump the evidence into the trash before the investigators show up. Yet that’s exactly what we do in plants all the time.
The Most Powerful Tool Isn’t a Lab Instrument
Most teams think root cause analysis starts with a lab report. It doesn’t. It starts with the people who walk the rounds.
Too many operators treat inspections as a checklist: “Oil level? Yep.” But deeper inspections like color, clarity, odor, noise, temperature can tell you far more than a dipstick ever will. If those observations get documented and trended, they build a timeline. And when you’re trying to reconstruct what happened first, that timeline is invaluable.
Empowering your frontline staff with better knowledge and better observational habits is one of the most powerful upgrades a facility can invest in. It will help prevent failures in the first place, and ensure that when failures do happen, they have enough context to know to preserve the evidence rather than wiping it away.
Closing the Case
At the end of the day, lubrication failures are a lot like a Clue board. You’re trying to figure out whether it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick—or maybe, in real life, Polyol Ester in the compressor with moisture ingression.
But try playing Clue when someone’s already lost half the cards. That’s what root cause analysis turns into when we don’t preserve the evidence.
Whether you prefer five whys, a fishbone diagram, or a strawman model, none of it works unless the right people are trained, the right observations are made, and the right clues are preserved.
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s this: evidence and observation matter more than any single tool or technique. When your team knows what to look for — and when they take the time to keep that information intact — lubrication failures become far easier to prevent and far easier to explain. That’s how you move from reacting to investigating, and from investigating to eliminating the failure altogether.
