Keep Your Hydraulic System Free Of Contaminants!

Ensuring that your hydraulic system is kept free of contamination is essential to ensure its reliable and long-lasting service. Whether your hydraulic system is a component of heavy-duty machinery, a domestic system or is essential to ensuring the continuous smooth-running of a power plant, keeping your hydraulic system clean should constantly be at the forefront of your mind.

Keeping your hydraulic system clean can result in a longer lifetime for every component and a much more reliable and cost-efficient system overall. Due to the wide variety of parts which appear in a hydraulic system, from hydraulic check valves to gear motors the slightest contamination of the hydraulic fluid can result in severe, and often irreparable, damage to a wide range of systems.

How Can Contaminants Damage A Hydraulic System?

For any system that relies on hydraulics, developing a strategy to ensure that the risk of contamination is kept to a minimum can be essential to its continued smooth running. Maintaining this strategy should be a task of high-priority, particularly in industrial environments, where an inefficient or broken hydraulics system can ground productivity to a halt.

The three most common contaminants which affect hydraulic systems of all kinds are particles, air and moisture, but heat can also have an effect on hydraulic systems.

How Can Particles Damage A Hydraulic System?

For particle contaminations, your primary concern should be those which are sized between 1 and 10 microns. Although small, and usually invisible to the human eye, these particles are likely to cause a hydraulic system failure in a wide range of ways. Whether they are damaging a specific component, such as a hydraulic check valve, or weakening the integrity of a hydraulic seal, these particles can often skip past filters which are not designed for such small intruders.

How Can Water Damage A Hydraulic System?

Even the smallest droplet of water can increase hydraulic system failure rates by as much as 20 times. Water can cause the hydraulic system itself to rust, which can then result in permanent failure due to corrosions, as well as introduce rust particles into the hydraulic fluid. Water is very different to most other hydraulic fluids, in that it can change state within the hydraulic system itself.

Under the pressure of a hydraulic system, water can boil, or vaporise, extremely easily. These vapour filled bubbles will continue to grow in size until they reach an area of extremely high-pressure, where the bubble will burst and collapse.

Water can also cause sticky resins to form within the hydraulic system, particularly in the clearance zones of hydraulic check valves, due to the removal of oil degradation by-products.

Can Air Really Damage A Hydraulic System?

Air in a hydraulic system can result in spongy control, which can be devastating to the operator’s control of the system’s pressure and in the readings of any actuator. Air can also result in a hydraulic system losing a great deal of horsepower, as energy is used to drive fluid through the air pocket and into the reservoir, rather than moving the actuator itself.

Hydraulic Check Valves To Meet Your Hydraulic System’s Specifications

Here at Flowfit Online, we offer a wide range of hydraulic check valves to help your system operate at its peak efficiency. Ensuring that your hydraulic system remains clean of any contaminants is essential to its continued operation, and can allow you to avoid any undesirable consequences.

Save yourself time and money by keeping your hydraulic system clean, and only choose the very best hydraulic check valves and components to ensure that your hydraulic system operates at its very best.

For more information call Flowfit on 01584 876 03301584 876 033 or email sales@flowfitonline.com. for advice on hydraulic systems today!