quote:
Meanwhile back in the aircraft industry a new breed of plastic lubricants called poly-ol esters had been developed for gas turbine use. Poly-ol ester lubricants are so strong that jet engines are filled with the lubricant when built and it remains in there for the life of the engine. Additive packages are replaced and renewed, but this base oil is so immensely strong that it can cope with the tremendous pressure and heat conditions without any degradation. The downside of this product is that it is expensive. For a lubricant to last the lifetime of an engine costing £1.0M, this is of no odds. Needless to say, oil company competition departments soon got hold of these products, although never in their wildest dreams would the accountants allow such a lubricant to be produced commercially - it actually cost something to produce, rather than being a free by-product of another process. The poly-ol esters are not only very very strong, but they replicate the viscosity change of the ideal engine lubricants with temperature, e.g. acting as a 20W50, without the addition of viscosity modifiers.
The dream lubricant had arrived for race engine designers. This lubricant not only fits the required viscosity profiles perfectly without additives - long chain viscosity modifiers not only break down quickly, but in high compression engines cause varnishing and detonation problems, but is extremely slippery, causing wondrous reductions in power sapping friction losses. The oil is almost impossible to aerate, meaning small oil tanks are possible. It has phenomenal film strength, around five times that of an equivalent weight mineral oil, so that a far lighter weight oil can be used to further cut frictional losses, pump sizes and oil pipe diameters. Poly-ol esters also have magnificent heat transfer properties to cut oil cooler sizes. Just when the Formula 1 designer was desperate to fit every mechanical part into the slimmest possible tube to allow the maximum ground-effect undertray size, along came an oil which allowed down-sizing of every oil system component. Road oil and race oil had parted company again.
Poly-ol ester lubricants really came into their own with the advent of the F1 turbo engine. 1500cc developing 1200 bhp. Maybe if the old adage 'The older I get, the faster I was.' is true, there really were 1500 bhp qualifying engines. Certainly the phrase '1000 bhp per litre' has a certain ring to it. Those of us who were stood at the Woodcote chicane for final qualifying for the 1985 British Grand Prix, when Keke Rosberg took pole position with an engine that melted its cylinder heads as he went across the line, have a sneaking feeling it might have been true. Gas turbine oil was well within its operating envelope in such conditions. The oil that lubricated that Honda engine in the Williams was called Mugen Oil and is spoken of in whispers in paddocks around the world, even today, as the answer to a fast lap in qualifying. It was produced by the Mobil competition department and still circulates at very inflated prices. (Indeed, I suspect that there is far more Mugen Oil in use now than was ever produced then, which is an interesting thought to folks who have paid big money for an unmarked can) In today's terms Mugen Oil is a fairly conventional 30 weight poly-ol ester, with the interesting addition of fish oil for certain applications. Yes, it does smell particularly dreadful, but there is a belief in the orient that it is a good slipperiness additive.
Poly-ol ester lubricants are still the very best lubricants available. All oil company competition departments have their own particular variations for their own sponsored teams. A steady stream of poly-ol ester oils leave these departments and trickle down to all other levels of racing. The club racer who has a friend, who has a friend, who has got him a special from high street company X competition department, has probably got a poly-ol ester lubricant. The danger of course is that the friend has got a free sample of gearbox oil, designed to run with silicon oil seals. He then puts this magic oil in his engine and is surprised and amazed when the oil complete with dissolved rubber oil seals and a couple of pistons in kit form fall out on the road, closely followed by the camshaft. Be warned also: race oils do not contain detergents, another cause of detonation in high compression engines. With no detergent package in your oil you can soon block oilways with the sludge from a bunch of cold starts.
Do you need a poly-ol ester oil for road use? If you are reading this, then you are interested in getting the best out of, and for, your vehicle, or you may be at the dentist. Poly-ol ester based lubricants have the advantage that your engine will never wear them out. They are as useful in a old wrecker with piston rings hanging off and bearing shells dropping out as in a multi-thousand pound race engine. Another useful property of the oil is that it does not break down in storage, as does a mineral oil. A vehicle may be left for years with the oil in the sump, and started up as fresh as a daisy when needed. Added to this is the extreme stickiness of the oil, which coats all parts with which it comes into contact and does not creep off, as do other 'synthetics'. For this reason many invaluable vintage, veteran and classic vehicles use nothing else. High street oil companies use poly-ol esters as additives - a very recent marketing exercise suggests that a wondrous new breakthrough in chemical engineering has developed this sticky oil additive, indeed magnet like, which when added to a mineral oil base produces a significant lubrication technology break-through! This semi-synthetic product retails at virtually the same price as poly-ol ester based lubricants! The synthetic brand leader, Mobil 1, is 'tri-synthetic', a mixture of PAO, di-ester and poly-ol ester and indeed brags on the can about jet engine technology. Unfortunately for the discerning motorist, the marketing men have decided that in the small UK market we only deserve one of the wide range of Mobil 1 synthetics available in the US, which cannot suit all engines.
There is one company that produces nothing but poly-ol ester based lubricants. The ethos of the firm is that the best lubricant base combined with the best additive package will be produced, regardless of cost, as there will always be a market for the unqualified highest quality. Based in the competition market, and suppliers to all race championships from Formula 1 through to boat racing, and including even bar stool racing! Red Line® Synthetic Oil Corporation in California also produce a wide range of road oils for engines and gearboxes, all poly-ol ester based. You are unlikely ever to find Red Line oil in Halfords, but you will find it sold by the major competition and classic car parts suppliers; Demon Tweeks, for instance, being a typical mail order outlet for Red Line in Europe. Red Line supply product and technical support to race engine and gearbox designers to allow maximum advantage to be taken of the poly-ol esters' attributes and are in the forefront of lubricant development. Within the UK, the home of race car development, Delta Oil, the European distributor for Red Line run a technical sales department which is open to enquiries from anyone wanting advice on poly-ol ester lubricants - 01572 678311 or E-mail [email protected]. Full product technical specifications are available on the Internet: www.redlineoil.com. I personally have taken a call from a gentleman suffering from a rattling Skoda engine, immediately followed by a call from a Formula 1 team - we were able to help both of them.
Polyolester Lubricants
- Thread starter buster
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You work for Redline now?
Buster - why? No references? Is this an "article"?
Seems more of a slanted diatribe.
Buster - why? No references? Is this an "article"?
Seems more of a slanted diatribe.
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Citing your source would be nice, buster. Like Pablo says, I can't tell if this from an ad or from an article.
Does AMSOIl use polyolesters, ? That's a mouthful, by the way. Anyway, doesn't ethylene alpha-olefin polymer give polyolesters a run for its money?
Does AMSOIl use polyolesters, ? That's a mouthful, by the way. Anyway, doesn't ethylene alpha-olefin polymer give polyolesters a run for its money?
What does my post have to do with Amsoil?
The article does seem like a sales pitch, yet you post it with no reference, no link other than Redline, no further comment. I question this and you bring up Amsoil. Why??????????
Please answer these questions honestly, buster.
The article does seem like a sales pitch, yet you post it with no reference, no link other than Redline, no further comment. I question this and you bring up Amsoil. Why??????????
Please answer these questions honestly, buster.
The text above is the last 6 paragraphs of the article in the link below. At the link, it is credited to Gavin Scott of Delta Oil Ltd.
http://www.volvoclub.org.uk/engine_oil_history.shtml
http://www.volvoclub.org.uk/engine_oil_history.shtml
Buster, I don't want to inhibit anyone from sharing info or expressing curiosity. However, plagiarism makes me very uncomfortable. Please cite.
[ May 22, 2006, 08:22 AM: Message edited by: GMorg ]
[ May 22, 2006, 08:22 AM: Message edited by: GMorg ]
GMorg, THANK YOU! I hanve never posted something without the source, but I lost this one. In fact, the one I had was from another car forum where someone posted it. The link is different then yours but thanks for posting it.
Pabs, does that answer your questions?
Pabs, does that answer your questions?
Well - it's no biggie that you lost the source. Stuff happens.
But you never have answered why you made the Amsoil comment. What does my original post have to do with Amsoil?
Pablo, I was just busting your balls.
You know I like you. You and Tooslick do a nice job. NO, I don't work for RL. Are you kidding? How many times have I questioned RL? I honestly did loose the link. If you look at most of what I post, I always put the source. This just happen to be the one time I lost it. I thought it was interesting considering the source "appears" to know quite a bit about oil. That is why I said take it for what it's worth....
OK
I just found it odd that an unbiased unnamed source gives a web link and the whole bit....
I just found it odd that an unbiased unnamed source gives a web link and the whole bit....
MolaKule
Staff member
Thee are many inaccuracies in this article in this one paragraph, and is poorly written. It sounds like someone lifted a number of other articles to attempt this one.
The base oils for jet engine lubricants and gearboxes are 3-7 cSt pentaerithyritols or Trimethylol propanes or a combination (depending on the appliation, not 20W50's) and for the most part contain small amounts of anti-oxidants, corrosion inhibitors, an a few other goodies.
The polyolester base oils by themselves are useless in gasoline engines without the proper additive package.
Complex esters are usually added to improve certain characteristics of jet engine oils.
Jimbo,
If you subtract the costs for the additives, and shipping, and insurance, and labor, and bottling, and ect, I bet the cost of the base oil is not huge.
If you subtract the costs for the additives, and shipping, and insurance, and labor, and bottling, and ect, I bet the cost of the base oil is not huge.
"free by-product of another process", then the $3-4 a gallon charged for dino base oils is 100% profit? Yeah, right.
MolaKule
Staff member
Think again. How about upwards of $1300/barrel for ester products.
I read the quote to say that mineral base oils were by products and cheap. I re-read the paragraph and still think that that the "free by-product" reference is directed toward mineral oil. I had assumed group I bases.
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