One of the greatest challenges in standing up a new system is slowing the commissioning task to assure that all hoses and lines have been flushed to achieve passivation. This is the process that cleans all foreign contaminates and establishes the patina on the surface of all stainless steel components to assure their full operating life. When this has not been done, the life of the hydraulic components in the system will have lost a significant percentage of their operating life before the system has started. An accepted delay here will dramatically reduce future downtime during operations.

Another significant challenge during commissioning is to assure that all lines, hoses, hydraulic motors, control valves, and associated components are full of clean fluid and void of air. The very expensive hydraulic pumps in a power unit are usually of a piston type and lack of adequate lubrication, cavitation, or aeration during the startup will dramatically reduce their life if not cause them to fail immediately. Failure to do this will cause damage to the pump but will not be apparent until an analysis is made after a failure.

Lubrication failure damage is easy to recognize in a failure analysis engineering evaluation and manufacturers will not cover such failures under warranty.

During commissioning, all components must be checked for proper alignment to assure you get the advertised operating life. Components that have been improperly aligned will fail with a distinctive failure signature.

Misalignment damage is easy to recognize in a failure analysis engineering evaluation and manufacturers will not cover such failures under warranty.

The fluid power system must be brought up to system speed and pressure very slowly to check for leaks and allow all air to be evacuated and pumps to fill with lubricating oil. Going slow here will dramatically reduce downtime in the future. The cost of a delay to properly commission a hydraulic system is easily recovered as a trade off for future downtime and loss of warranty.

All of these commissioning procedures are just as important when re-commissioning a system or recovering from a disaster.

At this point it would prudent for the operator to examine the F.I.V.E. Program offered by FPI. This program is a comprehensive plan to build quality and reliability into the fluid power system for better performance with less downtime. This program offers a way to sustain the fluid power system throughout the life cycle by using RFID equipment to catalog all the system components and implement improved maintenance policies that assure sustained clean fluid, systematic maintenance inspections, and improve predictive maintenance. This would be an excellent time to consider the added value of the F.I.V.E. Program for future maintenance.