Ask The Professor
Robert E. Kauffman is a noted chemist and recognized authority in fuel analysis, lubricants and refrigerants.
He is the Distinguished Research Chemist and Group Leader of the Fluid Analysis laboratory at the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI), the research arm of the University of Dayton, located in Dayton, Ohio. Kauffman is a widely respected expert with over 20 years experience in his field, and has been a principal investigator and group leader of the Fluids Analysis laboratory since 1988.
Bob Kauffman answers your questions about engine oil and the remarkable new IntelliStick.
If you have a question for The Professor about the oil in your vehicle, send it to: asktheprofessor@intellistick.com
Q: In the simplest of terms, I guess we should probably start with what oil and lubrication is and what the laymen needs to know about it; just basic things: what’s a detergent package and what contaminates oil, and how does it turn bad? What are the ways it can turn bad, and why is that significant?
A: The oil is the lifeblood of the engine. It not only lubricates but it also carries heat away from surfaces. It carries solids and contaminants away from moving surfaces so they can be filtered out. It has a lot of different functions and to do the functions properly it needs to have the right viscosity; it needs to have an anti-wear package…and it needs to be non corrosive. These are the main three things. The technologies we’ve been working on for the past 20 years have looked at the various aspects of oil and trying to decide what is important and what is not important. The chemistry of oil is constantly changing which also means that some of the standard techniques that used to work well, don’t work as well.
Discussing the detergent packages now seen in oil, these have started to increase dramatically. With engine oils, if you had one percent soot in your oil, that would be considered bad because the detergent package could only handle say half a percent; by the time you get to one percent, the soot would start to agglomerate, cause friction, and do some bad things to your engine. But now with the higher detergent packages they’re putting into oils they can withstand 4, 5, 6 percent soot and the oil is still considered good. Most soot is coming from the EGR system (exhaust gas recirculation, what they’re doing is putting contaminants back through the oil because of the environmental controls on the soot going into the environment. The soot is now being filtered into the oil instead. Therefore, the oil is being made to do more and more of the work.
Q: Can you discuss what the additives in oil are and how are they measured?
A: There are anti-oxidants, to protect the oil from oxidation and also trying to protect the ZDDP from oxidation, ZDDP which is an anti wear agent, and detergents. Oxidation is the measurement most people think about and it’s handled by a wide-range of tests. If you can take a sample out, you can check it for environmental factors to see if you’re engine is starting to wear, you can check it for acid number and viscosity, even though viscosity doesn’t change until the oil is pretty badly degraded. We can check it for antioxidants using an instrument called the “ruler.” You can test with FTIR, which is very popular, where you can look at 5 or 6 different parameters with one instrument and that’s a definite laboratory; it’s not onsite and can be expensive and time consuming.
Q: What can a coolant leak do to the oil?
A: There’s a lot of different aspects of the oil oxidation that you can look at, but the main thing that can cause the most damage the quickest is coolant leaks. When coolant gets into the oil, some coolant is dissolved however, it will begin reacting with metal surfaces and corroding it, and that’s the main thing that’s working to do the most damage.
Q: Is ZDDP working on this?
A: No, there is nothing in the oil to handle this, the only thing that’s really in the oil to handle it is the detergents and dispersants; they will keep the water molecules and the coolant molecules dissolved in the oil and as long as they’re dissolved, it can’t do much damage, but as the coolant leak progresses, then the coolant and water will start becoming insoluble and first the oil will look hazy and then it will get milky if you get it up to one or two percent and that’s where you can really do damage. The problem with the coolant leak is that there’s no timetable for it. Depending on your additive packages, you know there’s the debate whether you change the oil at 3,000, 5,000, 7,000, but there’s sort of a known time interval that you need to change it; whereas a coolant leak could happen right after an oil change, and by the time you do your next oil change at 7,000 miles, your engine could be totally destroyed by the coolant.
Q: What about contaminants like dirt in the oil?
A: Dirt, sand, things like that can get into your engine, but usually the filtration will take care of those, but if they obviously got heavy enough, they can cause some damage also. But that would be more of a wear, more of a scraping and abrasive wear not a corrosive wear that actually gets into the metal, again that would be handled, and that again that takes time and that would be handled by oil changes and such.
