Is it because it wants to be Royal Purple when it grows up? No, seriously, I did an oil change yesterday. As usual, some spilled on the garage floor. I sprayed a general purpose heavy-duty “cleaner/degreaser” on the oil and it turned bright purple! I’ve never seen that before. I sprayed some on some new oil and it did NOT turn purple, so this means some combustion by-product or engine wear component reacted with something in the cleaning fluid and turned purple. The bottle of cleaner listed the following three ingredients, including these numbers:
2 Butoxyetanol (111-7602)
Sodium Metasilicate (6834-92-0)
Sodium Hydroxide (1310 730-2)
Is there a chemist in the crowd who might know what turns purple when it reacts with one of the above chemicals? I recall hearing once that Chlorine turns purple when it contacts copper, is something like that going on? Do I have copper in my oil? I plan on sending a sample for analysis, but I won’t have the results for a week or so. Also, the analysis only checks for elements, and this reaction might be caused by some more complicated chemical that the analysis won’t show. I’ve been using a lot of fuel system cleaners lately and perhaps some type of solvent or other component got in the oil
If it matters, the engine has been running really well lately and the magnetic drain plug had even less than the usual amount of fuzz on it.
Thanks in Advance…
2 Butoxyetanol (111-7602)
Sodium Metasilicate (6834-92-0)
Sodium Hydroxide (1310 730-2)
Is there a chemist in the crowd who might know what turns purple when it reacts with one of the above chemicals? I recall hearing once that Chlorine turns purple when it contacts copper, is something like that going on? Do I have copper in my oil? I plan on sending a sample for analysis, but I won’t have the results for a week or so. Also, the analysis only checks for elements, and this reaction might be caused by some more complicated chemical that the analysis won’t show. I’ve been using a lot of fuel system cleaners lately and perhaps some type of solvent or other component got in the oil
If it matters, the engine has been running really well lately and the magnetic drain plug had even less than the usual amount of fuzz on it.
Thanks in Advance…