An Interview with Piet Lugt, SKF Piet Lugt will be a featured speaker at Bearing the Load: Back to the Basics of Grease, the 2019 NLGI Annual Meeting, June 8-11, 2019, Las Vegas, Nevada USA Piet stands tall (literally and figuratively) as a leader in grease lubrication, tribology and bearing technology. He is the author of many papers, presentations, and a book, Grease Lubrication in Rolling Bearings. NLGI members can read this interview to learn about Piet’s career and his viewpoints on greases, performance testing, choices for guests and menu at a perfect dinner party, and challenges for the grease industry. NLGI: Tell us about your family, upbringing, education and where you grew up. How did they shape you to become the person you are today? How did they contribute to your development into an expert in lubricating greases and their applications? PL: I grew up in a small town in the East of the Netherlands. We lived on the premises of a road construction company where my Father was in charge of technical services. It was very quiet on the weekends, and I could use the repair shop for road construction machinery such as trucks, excavators, and asphalt machines. I learned to ride motorcycles, drive cars, and work on all kinds of vehicles to upgrade and repair them. I still remember the first time that I opened a gearbox; there was a broken belt in it. It was a real old gearbox, and I was surprised to see the excellent conditions of the gears The conditions of the bearings did not attract my attention at that time.... Of course I realized that the condition of the gears must somehow be related to lubrication, but I was 15 years
old and did not think any further about it at that time… Engineering Education After finishing my secondary education at the age of 18, I left home to live on the campus of the University of Twente in the city of Enschede in the Netherlands, about 90 km from where I grew up. This distance is small by US standards but large in a country that is only about 200 km wide. I studied mechanical engineering, did an additional MSc in “teaching physics”, and finished with a PhD in tribology. During my studies in Twente, I tried to learn how to play the electric guitar from friends, built my own amplifier, and played in a few bands. The University facilitated this by providing studios that could be reserved weekly. We performed with the bands mainly in the area close to the University and even recorded an LP. This was a fantastic experience! Despite our high ambitions, this did not result in world fame, and I stopped performing when I started my PhD project. During the 3rd year of my studies, I took the course “Introduc- 44 VOLUME 83, NUMBER 1
tion to Tribology”, which was taught by Prof. Bosma, an inspiring lecturer who had worked at Shell Research in Thornton, UK. Learning about hydrodynamic lubrication was fantastic: if you are able to provide machine elements with a lubricating film that fully separates the contacting surfaces, then these elements would never fail! The film is generated by pure hydrodynamic action, so the only thing you need is enough oil with the right viscosity to provide proper lubrication so that nothing would ever fail! Now I understood why the gears in the gearbox that I opened at the age of 15 were in such perfect condition, even after very long service time, because the gear teeth never really made contact! After I started learning about tribology, I became an enthusiastic student of mechanical engineering. In addition to Prof Bosma, I was inspired by Prof Hans Moes (who developed the minimum set of dimensionless numbers describing elasto-hydrodynamic lubrication) and Prof Wytze ten Napel, my PhD mentor. Prof ten Napel taught me that you can recognize people who really understand the technical problem that
