Improved top-tier lubricant performance with renewable base stocks and additives
The focus in the global lubricant base stock market today is to find lubricant solutions that pair high-performance with improved product sustainability. This need is fueled largely by OEM demand for increased reliability and energy efficiency, government demand for improved emissions in the form of regulations, and growing consumer demand for both improved performance and sustainability.
Generally, high-performance synthetic base stocks — the fastest growing segment of the lubricant market — have been engineered to increasingly and progressively meet these needs, but challenges are becoming greater and next generation lubricants will require a new class of solutions to advance innovation.
Driven by newly commercialised technology, new classes of cost- competitive, renewable, carbon-based building blocks can supplement or even replace critical feedstocks for PAOs, POEs, and other high-value base stocks and additive components due to the higher performance properties of renewable materials. One recent product example, Elevance Aria™ WTP 40, is a commercially available, high-viscosity lubricant base stock utilising novel functionalised base oil (FBO) molecular architectures made from renewable carbon-based building blocks. FBO base stock is made possible due to Elevance’s Inherent™ renewable building blocks, which enable novel base stock and additive architectures that result in improved performance that addresses today’s challenging lubricant industry requirements.
Aria, a high-performance, high- viscosity product, is designed to provide differentiated performance in broad markets such as engine and gear lubricants, compressor fluids, industrial and hydraulic fluids, and greases. Aria addresses the demand for high- performance renewable base stocks, a PAO-type oligomer that is functionalized with covalently bonded ester. Covalently bonding ester to a PAO backbone
gives differentiated performance that outperforms traditional PAO and ester technologies.
The functionality and chain lengths found in the new class of renewable building block feedstocks used to make FBO provides improvements previously not available in high-viscosity PAO technology, such as additive solvency. The olefin backbone and relative bulky size of FBO versus traditional small molecule esters provides advantages typically not found in traditional technology esters, such as elastomer compatibility.
A functionalised high-viscosity base stock offers improved performance in additive solvency, wear and foam resistance. Balanced additive solvency, where an optimised level of additive solubility functionality is bonded to the molecule, is another improvement over high-viscosity PAO synthetic base stocks. Aria base stock can solubilise additives to form a clear lubricant, eliminating the need to add esters or any other additive solubility aid, which can sometimes reduce lubricant performance in other areas.
Data also indicates that Elevance Aria™ WTP 40 Mini Traction Machine wear improves wear scars in a 75W90 GL-5 fully formulated lubricant formulation compared to PAO 40/ester blends. The Aria molecular structure is also inherently foam-resistant, without anti-foams. Eliminating anti-foam in high-viscosity lubricants can result in more predictable lubricant performance, without negatively affecting the performance of other lubricant additives. In some cases,
anti-foam effectiveness may deplete upon aging, increasing the risk that foam and resulting lubricant problems may return.
New solutions for the lubricant market are available today. Elevance’s 180,000 MT joint venture biorefinery with Wilmar International, now operating in Gresik, Indonesia, provides Elevance and its partners a commercial source of building block materials to develop and commercialise high-performance renewable lubricant components and finished lubricants. Elevance deploys a proprietary metathesis catalyst technology to transform available vegetable oils into novel, high- performing molecules in a low-pressure, low-temperature process that consumes significantly less energy and reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50 percent compared to typical petrochemical technologies - all while enabling a new class of building block chemicals.
The future of the lubricants industry requires next generation technology that is both sustainable and capable of delivering improved fuel economy, lower emissions and improved metal protection in modern, high-power density engines Renewable building blocks and derivatives - derived from nature’s complex vegetable oils but modified by metathesis technology to eliminate the many compromises of these oils - represent a key solution for the formulation of next-generation, high- performing lubricants and additives.
LINK
www.elevance.com
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LUBE MAGAZINE NO.123 OCTOBER 2014
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