Lube-Tech Introduction
As the concept of sustainability in lubes and greases grows in popularity and is more widely analysed, it becomes more comprehensive. It also becomes clear that sustainable lubricants involve more than just the raw materials and finished goods. It should also include a thorough life cycle assessment, from the extraction of base oil to transportation, processing, distribution, end use and finally disposal.
This paper highlights the incorporation of 3 approaches to manufacturing conventional or biobased greases. Its scope is on the sustainability of the manufacturing process and does not cover the raw materials or their sources.
There is a common appreciation of the fact that biodegradable lubricants are more environmentally preferrable. But to the educated end user, true acceptance would require lifecycle analyses in all aspects of the process of producing biobased products. From the growing of the crops, to extraction of oil, transportation, and to manufacturing process involved in producing the finished lubricants. The process described below came about due to the observed difficulties of making biobased grease in over 23 years of manufacturing. Improvements were made out of necessity to reduce manufacturing cost to better compete in the market with a mature and well-established mineral-oil based lubricant products.
PUBLISHED BY LUBE: THE EUROPEAN LUBRICANTS INDUSTRY MAGAZINE
No.146 page 1
Sustainability in the Processing of Lubricants
Dr. Lou A. Honary, President, Environmental Lubricants Manufacturing, Inc.
There is a saying that expresses some of the problems in grease processing: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
First, in 2007, a manufacturing plant designed to manufacture ELM’s biobased greases was destroyed in a heat transfer oil fire after 7 years of operation. The fire necessitated a genuine search for a different approach to heating for reaction and resulted in the invention of microwave-based grease processing. The concept has been reported in earlier issues of this magazine and was also presented at the National Lubricating Institute’s annual meeting in 2013.
The next problem with manufacturing grease seemed to be the effectiveness of cooling or quenching once the reaction is completed at temperatures of 200°C-230°C. As grease is a poor conductor of heat, both the heating for reaction and the cooling of the reacted product requires a significant amount of time, expensive dual motion jacketed mixing vessels and cooling towers or chiller systems. Slow cooling results in a softer grease and for the practitioners this is a costly problem because it is easier to thin down a thick grease than thickening a thin grease. Fast quenching also leads to higher yields as a more condensed soap structure is formed with effective quenching, thus requiring more thinned down oil, and resulting in more final product (yield). The grease performance properties are also impacted by fast or slow cooling and abundant literature exists on this subject.
LUBE MAGAZINE NO.175 JUNE 2023 29
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