Metalworking Fluid
Development: Opportunity out of Complexity?
Robert Stubbs General Manager – Sea-Land Chemical Europe Ltd
As we move towards the final ‘ten tonne’ chapter of REACh in mid 2018 and raw material suppliers, customers and end users brace themselves for the next ‘low volume material’ sacrifice, it is not surprising that many metalworking fluid formulators are increasingly concerned about their ability to create innovation out of an increasingly smaller pallet of available raw materials.
The last ten years have seen health, safety and environmental pressures consume the development of these industrial fluids and create a complexity to their formulation that has been seen on a global basis. Unfortunately many of the HSE issues are not consistent on an international basis so development has almost become ‘localised’ across three continents with the holy grail of the global formulae increasingly out of reach (no pun intended).
As the chemical industry slowly moves further East, so too do the supply routes for some of the traditional components in these products. Even some of the major historical chemical companies in the West manufacture or source their components in the increasingly technically capable chemical facilities of China and India for both economical and regulatory advantage.
Against this backdrop, the end use applications in this sector become increasingly more complex as car manufacturers use more and more non-ferrous materials, processes are simplified to reduce cost and the HSE issues are pushed back to the fluid suppliers to take full responsibility for the potential in use effects on the machine tool operators.
Nowhere was this experienced more in Europe over the last few years than in France, where this push back responsibility created a fairly rapid movement away from formaldehyde release biocides in water based metalworking fluids, from an industry that is more used to evolution than revolution.
It is this necessity to move more rapidly through the development process that creates concern in an industry that needs to work through many long term testing regimes to ensure that the products offer long term stability during storage, the in use product is able to withstand extremes of use for extended periods and ultimately the product will be fit for purpose and unlikely to have any detrimental effect on machine tools with very expensive price tags.
The facet of product or emulsion life has been one of great concern to MWF formulators over recent years. The pressure on the use of boric acid based products, the categorisation of biocides within the BPR and the increasingly restrictive labelling issues associated with components that control bacteria have pushed formulators to look at novel ways to extend fluid life.
The use of alternative amines to support reduced biocidal activity, the use of more bio-resistant cyclic structure raw materials and a movement away from components that are easily degraded are all helping to provide answers to the questions created by the regulatory pressure.
However, the most successful R & D innovators in this sector
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LUBE MAGAZINE NO.139 JUNE 2017
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