Food grade grease performance in aggressive, sub-sea application

Supplying food grease for sub-sea application was something that never entered our minds until we received an enquiry from an oil exploration company operating off the South Coast of America.

The country the company were operating in was requiring them to use food grade lubricants in the application in case there was any contamination to the environment.

The OEM was extremely anxious that any alternate lubricant should not be inferior in quality or performance to the heavy-duty industrial grease that had been used for some years.

They felt the performance of this grease was adequate, although they freely admitted it had caused some issues with disassembly owing to its use at depths of up to 3,000 metres.

Activate’s technical team compared the technical information on the existing product and were happy to recommend Activate Longlife Grease as a higher specification, foodgrade alternative.

Longlife is an extremely high-performance, heavy-duty, fully synthetic grease that features the very latest water-resistant calcium sulfonate technology for superior corrosion and wear performance.

When the client reordered for this application sometime later (already a sign that the Activate food grease had been successful!), we had the opportunity to gather full feedback on how our lubricant had performed.

The client was delighted to inform us that the sub-sea research vessel had been brought back for full strip downs and reassembly twice as part of routine maintenance, and on both occasions the components had disassembled perfectly and had no visible wear!

This exceeded even our own expectations of what has proven to be an extremely durable and long-lasting product, one which shows its quality in even the harshest environments.

It is also a great illustration of how manufacturing a lubricant from the angle of ‘best performance’ (as opposed to ‘lowest cost’) results in a product that exceeds expectation, and this example has certainly motivated the Activate team to continue their pursuit of innovation and excellence!

If you are looking for a holistic food grade lubrication partner to ensure your applications run at their optimum (above or below water!), then please contact us for a free GAP analysis.