How Does Nye Qualify Our Lubricants?

Why Qualify?

What does it mean to qualify a lubricant? In order to be a qualified lubricant supplier, manufacturers must go through several steps to ensure that a lubricant can be manufactured the exact same way, every time, with minimal variations in the end-product. This process verifies that formulated lubricants can be manufactured reliably without encountering any unknown variables that may change products in a way that would pose risk to a customer’s application. This is particularly important in industries such as automotive, medical and aerospace where failure comes at the cost of safety. There are three steps to achieve full qualification: installation, operational, and process qualification.

Installation Qualification

During installation qualification, time is taken to ensure that the equipment requirements for production are understood and documented. Once these requirements have been identified, the equipment must be run to test if it is setup correctly. An example of a requirement that would need to be validated would be the power and voltage requirements for the process.

Operational Qualification

After the installation requirements have been documented and validated, operational qualification can begin. During operational qualification, processes involved in manufacturing the lubricant are run at both the high and low end of the operating spectrum. Examples of process variables would be temperature, mixing speed, and time. Nye then determines the acceptable range of variation for these process factors.

Process Qualification

Once the equipment and operating parameters have been decided, Nye runs the manufacturing process as documented three times from start to finish. Each batch of the lubricant is tested after each run to make sure that any variances are within the specified range.

Qualified lubricants are lubricants you can trust. Documentation at Nye helps provide reassurance that our lubricants are produced reliably and to standard. To learn more about our Quality Management System and ISO Certifications, visit our Quality Page.