Evaluation of Water and Dust in the Grease 2011-36-0139

The water and dust contamination has being studied as an important factor for the components life. For the evaluation of water and dust, it is important that a good method of analysis has been defined. This paper will present a method used to evaluate the grease contamination with dust and water and the actions made to improve the analysis of grease. In order to evaluate the water content in the grease, it was used the Karl Fischer titration. This method determines trace amount of water in a sample. A restriction of this analysis is the grease sample amount, which could not be fully titrated. So just part of the grease (contaminated with water) is analyzed and due to the heterogeneity of the grease and water mixture, this small sample of grease does not necessarily have the same amount of water than the whole grease. The evaluation of dust in the grease is made using a vacuum manifolds filtration system that contains also errors due to the dissolution of the grease and the membrane used to filter the solution. Based on these facts, it was decided to study these analysis methods, which lead to some improvements presented here.