In our recent interview Nathan Lechene, Business Development Manager of Basic Metals at FUCHS, discusses how advanced rolling oils are driving progress in sustainability, lowering total cost of ownership, improving lubricant maintenance, and delivering higher quality finished goods for steel plants. He'll cover practical solutions and real-world examples of how we've helped solve our customer's lubrication challenges.
How are rolling oils and greases being made more sustainable for steel mills?
That's an excellent question. As far as the actual usage at steel mills, there's a few ways to make them more sustainable. You'll never get away from using lubricants and having some level of waste as long as you have components that move. Moving components do require lubrication. But having advanced technologies in your production process and your chemistries can really help in ways that you reduce consumption. You can reduce the waste of these products, so you can make them more waste treatable or even go so far as to implement additional reprocessing and filtering technologies to make these used lubricants repurposed and back to original quality.
In what ways can lubricant maintenance programs help steel plants save on costs?
Well, that's probably the single largest impact that lubricants can have is in their maintenance program, right? Because equipment breakdowns, repairs, replacement costs, and downtime can be extremely expensive. So, implementing the proper maintenance program gives you improved equipment reliability, reduces your maintenance costs, and saves on unplanned downtime.
A lot of these steel mills are operating on eight to fifteen percent profit margins. If you have an unplanned down day, that's fourteen percent, which can be all the profitability the mill has for that entire week. So, implementing the proper maintenance program, whether through internal teams, suppliers, or a service company, is one of the most important and critical aspects to productivity, cost savings, and profitability for a mill.
What are the key elements of an effective lubricant maintenance program, and how can companies implement them?
The best way to consider that is to make sure that you have the right product, in the right place, in the right amount. Take bearings, for example—seventy-five percent of bearing failures occur from having the wrong product or the wrong amount. It’s not that the bearings wear out; it’s lubrication-related.
It’s also important that you monitor them. For gear oil systems, MORGOIL systems, or rolling oil systems, continuous sampling and monitoring is a cornerstone of proper maintenance. Without data and actionable data, you can’t improve reliability.
One of the best ways to implement this is to partner with a professional supplier like FUCHS. FUCHS has highly qualified engineers in the field and an entire Smart Services division dedicated to data-driven collection, monitoring, and maintenance programs.
How can rolling oils help improve the quality of finished steel products?
Rolling oils have direct contact with the product—steel, aluminum, stainless steel, or titanium—so they have a direct impact on product quality. The chemistry of the product is the single most important factor. Optimized chemistries can improve roll forces, mill cleanliness, and strip cleanability.
One of the most common problems mills face is using older fat- and lard-based rolling oil chemistries, which result in dirty coils with greasy residues, iron fines, and dirt. This negatively impacts downstream processes like cleaning lines and galvanizing lines.
A major U.S. steel manufacturer conducted an advanced study using one of our latest formulas and found ninety percent less residue—specifically carbon residue—compared to other products. This means less cleaning, less chemical usage, reduced saponification, less antifoam, cleaner strips, higher throughput, and higher-quality galvanized finishes.
There’s a huge impact from upgrading rolling oil technology, especially when mills adopt cutting-edge solutions.
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