Frequent Change of Synthetic Oil Brands Cause for Increased Engine Wear ?

dnewton3 said:
The phenomenon certainly does exist; higher wear comes at the front end of an OCI. But to be very clear about this, we're NOT talking about massive detrimental wear escalation after the OCI. The shift is typically, it's about 1ppm higher or so. However, it's not associated with changing brands as you indicate. It's simply changing oil that causes the uptick in wear rate; the brand and base stock are not precipitator of the wear increase.

- Discussed here in detail:

Used Oil Analysis: How to decide what is normal - Bob is the Oil Guy

Reviewing UOA Data Used oil analyses (UOAs) are tools. And like most tools, they can either be properly used or misused, depending upon the application, the user, the surrounding conditions, etc.= There are already many good articles and publications in existence that tell us how to interpret...
bobistheoilguy.com

- Also as noted, here:

The Effect of Oil Drain Interval on Valvetrain Friction and Wear

Engine oils are subjected to a series of industry standard engine dynamometer tests to measure their wear protection capability, sludge and varnish formation tendencies, and fuel efficiency among several other performance attributes before they are approved for use in customer engines. However, thes
www.sae.org www.sae.org

I have 20k+ UOAs in my database (literally; so many that I've lost count). The data proves with no shadow of doubt that there is a slight uptick of wear after an OCI.
Click to expand...
I have often wondered if it is actually increased wear or remnants of higher concentrations of wear metals which are in the oil that remains in the engine after an oil change and it levels off as the new oil picks up new wear metals.

Seems like if 100% engine cleaning was performed as part of a controlled test, it would help determine if that was a possibility.

Could be some merit to it since you can see additive pack components carrying over between OCIs when the new oil does not have that component (titanium vs. moly or sodium as an example).

EDIT: Here MS5K has sodium as part of its additive pack, but Kendall does not (as far as I know), yet you see sodium showing in the UOAs after the MS5K was used:

Add Pack.jpg
 
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The topic of residual oil content in the short OCIs is reasonable and has been discussed. The problem is that there's no easy way to know how much is residual vs. actual wear due to less TCB. It's logical to conclude there is a blend of the two; something like X% residual and Y% wear. However, we'll never know for sure. It's almost certainly not all of one and none of the other. There is evidence (plenty of it) to show that wear metals increase in short OCIs. That is indisputable; the correlation is consistent across tens of thousands of UOAs. What is unclear is the causation of that phenomenon. And it's likely that knowing the exact cause is difficult to understand because of the complexity of discerning the % delta between residual and elevated wear.

But that's a sub-textual conversation to the overriding topic ...
People often assume that changing oil frequently leads to less wear. That's clearly not the case. It's wrong to assume it's detrimental; there's no evidence of that. But it's not "helpful" in terms of wear control, either. Those who change oil frequently thinking they are avoiding wear are on a fool's errand. The real thing to glean is that extending the OCIs out most certainly is proven to reduce wear rates and friction. The Ford/Conoco study showed that the valvetrain friction dropped by an order of magnitude (10x) as the OCI matured. There exists metric tons of data proving the wear rates drop as the OCIs mature.

Most simply put: You don't have to know the cause of a condition or phenomenon to acknowledge that it exists. And denial of the above facts don't make them any less true.
 
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In my experience I have come to the conclusion that wear happens after an oil change due to the people who don't fill the filters with oil and on start up. It is slight with no way to measure except for the oil light on we would not know. I do oil change once a year or change oil when oil change light comes on and use a 0w oil for quicker circulation at start up. The biggest myth out there right now is a 0w in hot climates will damage your engines as it is to thin.
 
My sons old Cobalt had 225k on it and all he ever put in it was whatever I snagged on sale/clearance. Some changes were a frankenbrew of misfit qts. He ran organics sometimes (Chevron from Costco) and a variety of synthetics. The key was he changed it regularly and used a decent filter (also bought on sale)
I realize thats hardly conclusive evidence but its good enough for me.
 
tiger862 said:
In my experience I have come to the conclusion that wear happens after an oil change due to the people who don't fill the filters with oil and on start up. It is slight with no way to measure except for the oil light on we would not know. I do oil change once a year or change oil when oil change light comes on and use a 0w oil for quicker circulation at start up. The biggest myth out there right now is a 0w in hot climates will damage your engines as it is to thin.
Click to expand...
That one too.
 
The wear at the beginning of an OCI is from the stripping of anti-wear films. This isn't some BITOG hearsay, it's documented in SAE publications. These tribofilms are acidic, much like the synthetic ester of ZDDP that formed them, and fresh detergents will try to neutralize that acidity because that's their job. Detergents are kinda like antibiotics in this sense in that they don't discriminate between good and bad. They see an acid, they neutralize it. The new ZDDP doesn't instantly form a tribofilm but rather takes time for it to build up with heat and friction. In that timeframe, there's the opportunity for a slight increase in the wear rate. It's largely insignificant to most engines. The "dry" startup, waiting for oil to flow to the top of the engine after an oil change, likely attributes more wear than this cycle does. It won't be something easily noticeable in any engine with less than 200k miles. However, it is still there.

PontiacHO said:
I’m confused. I was under the impression that late model engines don’t need ZDDP.
Click to expand...

Any engine with parts that operate in boundary or mixed lubrication needs anti-wear additives to carry the load in those regimes... which is every engine in existence and will ever be built. If the oil had no ZDDP or any other anti-wear additives, the cylinder walls and rings would be toast very quickly, same for the valvetrain. Even roller lifters and followers benefit from an anti-wear tribofilm. The only part of the engine that doesn't (shouldn't) see boundary lubrication are the bearings. This is why API still mandates a minimum amount of phosphorus (from ZDDP) at 600 ppm.
 
I've owned a lot of cars and trucks and OPE over the last 60 years and it seems like they all gave an oil spec in the manuals but never recommended using only one brand for the engine's life. FWIW most of the vehicle fleets that accumulate very high miles typically get a "low bid that meets the spec" fill of lube.
 
Greasymechtech said:
Don't rely on the zddp. Join the MOFT religion.

And, new oil isn't iso filtered. It might not have any combustion ash/soot but it definitely has pipeline, bottling, storage tanks, and blending plant detritus debris whatever. Until its filtered out, its tearing into your engine.
Click to expand...
You obviously haven’t looked at any ISO cleanliness numbers from particle counts on @High Performance Lubricants oils straight out of the bottle, have you?

It’s just one reason why HPL promotes getting as close to a single-use container as possible, to reduce the opportunity for contaminating their oils prior to getting it into your machine’s sump, whatever machine it is.
 
tiger862 said:
In my experience I have come to the conclusion that wear happens after an oil change due to the people who don't fill the filters with oil and on start up. It is slight with no way to measure except for the oil light on we would not know. I do oil change once a year or change oil when oil change light comes on and use a 0w oil for quicker circulation at start up. The biggest myth out there right now is a 0w in hot climates will damage your engines as it is to thin.
Click to expand...
Actually, the biggest myth out there right now is that 0w oils provide any benefit whatsoever regarding “quicker circulation” if temperatures are above 0*F.
 
dnewton3 said:
The topic of residual oil content in the short OCIs is reasonable and has been discussed. The problem is that there's no easy way to know how much is residual vs. actual wear due to less TCB. It's logical to conclude there is a blend of the two; something like X% residual and Y% wear. However, we'll never know for sure. It's almost certainly not all of one and none of the other. There is evidence (plenty of it) to show that wear metals increase in short OCIs. That is indisputable; the correlation is consistent across tens of thousands of UOAs. What is unclear is the causation of that phenomenon. And it's likely that knowing the exact cause is difficult to understand because of the complexity of discerning the % delta between residual and elevated wear.

But that's a sub-textual conversation to the overriding topic ...
People often assume that changing oil frequently leads to less wear. That's clearly not the case. It's wrong to assume it's detrimental; there's no evidence of that. But it's not "helpful" in terms of wear control, either. Those who change oil frequently thinking they are avoiding wear are on a fool's errand. The real thing to glean is that extending the OCIs out most certainly is proven to reduce wear rates and friction. The Ford/Conoco study showed that the valvetrain friction dropped by an order of magnitude (10x) as the OCI matured. There exists metric tons of data proving the wear rates drop as the OCIs mature.

Most simply put: You don't have to know the cause of a condition or phenomenon to acknowledge that it exists. And denial of the above facts don't make them any less true.
Click to expand...
Without knowing the source of the "increased wear" and the inability to separate the potential noise (residual oil versus true wear), I struggle with absolute statements like more frequent or shorter OCIs contribute to increased wear.

I totally accept the wear metal PPM increases at the beginning of the run as shown in many UOAs, I am not convinced the PPM increase is due to actual additional wear metals being generated versus contamination from a previous run.

Until the two can be separated with reasonable certainty, I remain in the skeptical group.
 
It's okay to be skeptical. It's a good thing, even. That's how we challenge conventional wisdom. I'm on the side of higher wear rate is POSSIBLE with shorter oil changes based on data suggesting such. It may not apply to every engine or situation. There's likely not enough data, nor enough care or effort to get more, to assert that shorter OCIs will for sure increase wear. We can only go off the data that is available. For me, if properly tested and observed data points in one direction, I'm inclined to give it at least some degree of merit until contradictory data is presented. Unfortunately, with something like this, it's probably not something we'll ever get an exact, repeatable answer on as I doubt there's much effort being put into testing it.
 
And as is always the case, observing something is the easy part. Ascribing it to an isolated variable is the much more difficult aspect. This is where PhD mathematicians and trained experimentalists come into play, ensuring that a test is statistically significant.

We see this all the time on here IRT spectrographic analyses and fuel consumption. It's downplayed in nearly every instance.
 
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