The problem
The Infineum Group of companies is
a world-class petroleum additives enterprise. With its headquarters
in the UK, it has regional business and technology centres in the
UK, US and Singapore.
Infineum is a developer, manufacturer and marketer of lubricant
additives, with its customers being oil companies and other
lubricant and fuel marketers.
For motor oil to operate efficiently it has to have the correct
consistency and achieving this may require the use of additives.
Infineum produce specialist lubrication oils that contain inorganic
chalk-like particles coated with a waxy detergent
layer. Conventional analysis techniques were unable to
determine the precise effect these additives were having on
formulation so the optimum composition could not easily be
determined.
The challenge
Infineum's own techniques had provided only general data,
insufficient to characterise the additives in detail, and thus
their researchers were unable to ascertain the effect of adding or
removing an ingredient to the formulation. STFC
Innovations Ltd at Daresbury SIC were contacted to see if they
could help.
A particular challenge was the response time - it had to be
rapid so that modification could be made to the formulation without
major loss of production time.
The solution
Researchers at the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) at Daresbury
Laboratory employed small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) to
examine a large number of formulations of particles and detergent
composition in the oil. Typically the calcium and magnesium
detergent particles are 2050 Å in size, a range that is easily
accommodated by the SAXS method. In addition to providing
information about particle size, SAXS also enables the particle
shape and size distributions to be determined. The technique
was operating at the limits of its sensitivity, and required
considerable skill and experience from SRS staff to extract the
subtle changes in the signal from the background noise. Only the
high intensity of the X-rays produced by the synchrotron enabled
this information to be obtained.
This characterisation of detergent additives in motor oil
samples allowed quantification of process changes, control of
rheological properties and performance characteristics of the
finished product and prediction of the various interactions that
can occur between detergent molecules and other additives in the
finished oil. The results allowed Infineum to define a narrow
range of formulations that gave optimum operating performance.
Benefits
- The problem was solved promptly and effectively due to the
specialist equipment and expertise available through STFC
Innovations Ltd.
- The results allowed Infineum to define precisely the range of
formulations it could tolerate to give best performance of its
oilLoss of production time was kept to a minimum due to the rapid
turnaround time between receiving the sample and reporting back the
results