Abstract.

A detailed study of the different techniques to analyse wear metals in used lubricant oils is made in this Thesis, selecting the optimum methodology to detect failures or contaminants in lubricated machines. The suggested procedure included a magnetic separation of the particles and a later polymeric membrane filtration.
The obtained results are compared with the actual inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) process, showing a more accurate diagnosis of the lubricant.