Hydraulic Fluid Cleanliness
Why is Hydraulic Fluid Cleanliness important?
Hydraulic fluid is used as the motive power for many actuated valves, often in subsea applications. Integral to the actuator are components with small bores that can become blocked if the fluid has particles of debris within it. Clearing a blockage can be difficult, time consuming and very expensive, especially in subsea applications. Therefore it is common to specify that the hydraulic fluid used in the system is cleaned to a measurable degree of cleanliness e.g. NAS 6.
Are there Standards for Hydraulic cleanliness?
Measuring hydraulic cleanliness is not straight forward, consequently various standards exist on this subject. The two most likely to be encountered in the oil & gas, and process industries are The ISO Cleanliness Code (ISO 4406), and The NAS 1638 cleanliness standard.
An ntroduction to each of these allowable particle contamination standards is provided below.
The ISO Cleanliness Code, ISO 4406
The ISO Cleanliness Code, ISO 4406, 1987 is the perhaps the most widely used International standard for representing the particle contamination level of industrial fluid power systems. Under ISO 4406 cleanliness is classified by a two number code, e.g. 16/13, based on the number of particles greater than 5 µm and 15 µm respectively in a known volume of fluid. However some manufacturers have expanded the code to three numbers by the addition of a code number representing the number of particles greater than 2 µm, e.g. 18/16/13. Using the table below, we can see a cleanliness rating of 18/16/13 would mean that there were
1300 - 2500 particles greater than 2 micron in size
320 - 640 particles greater than 5 micron in size, and
40 - 80 particles greater than 15 microns in size.
The full table of particle count ranges for the ISO cleanliness code is shown in the ISO 4406 chart below:
