Calcium vs Magnesium vs Zinc in Engine Oils

so could you may please maybe describe in a little bit more detail what kind of competition you're talking about so obviously zdp is polar so it has to react under temperature and load to create that phosphate glass film that we all talk about that provides that very thick robust and I wear a film detergents are also polish especially calcium based detergents are very polar so what was happening and we'll call it the mid-2000s with API SM is you had calcium tended to be do pretty good in terms of a lower friction right that's one of the big things between calcium and magnesium is that magnesium tends to be a really great detergent in terms of it's got really great uh acid neutralization ability right so it really can give you a lot of TBN for a small dose but but tends to be kind of poor on friction so in that mid-2000 era what you saw was a lot of the Advent package uh went towards very high level of calcium because that calcium with a lower friction so it would give you fuel economy that's great the problem was that that is super high level of the calcium it was there was so much competition at the surface level between the detergent and the zdp that you had very splotchy VDP films which lower valve spring pressures lower loads and not a big problem higher pressures higher loads problem and that's where this stuff came around interesting I I see these people talking about SP oils and how the new SP and the dexos Gen 2 or the Gen 3 oils have you know lower calcium they're lower TBN and let's just say it right I can hear the people looking down their nose at it like somehow another is not good reality is it's better when we first started testing some of the SN plus oil we did a lot about train testing we're taking flat taffet engines and we're measuring all 16 lobes on non-phosated cans right because what back in the day the 3G test used a cam that had a break-in coating on the camshaft uh okay well that's kind of mask what the oil does so we we work with competition cams in here in the US and made special cams for our own version we're called a racing 3G essentially no break-in coding so you're the oil was the only thing that was going to do the job that way you could really see what those chemistry differences was so of course like any good test you have to have reference oils what do you get a new batch of cams you got to run the known good reference then on bad reference well you go well the known bad reference wasn't off the shelf a wheel well all of a sudden we go and we run our known bad reference oil there's what this is like way better than experience like you guys ground the camshafts wrong it went from SN to SN Plus when you look at the used oil from that test the difference was the zdp was the same detergent package of change so then we went on a little mission right we're gonna go grab a bunch of the other known bad oils around the past we're gonna run them again they all ran good yeah play better than before what was the difference when we went to SN plus and SP we changed that balance so from aware protection standpoint we've seen an increase in wear protection via the decrease in calcium the elimination of sodium because obviously sodium is really bad for low speed pre-ignition high level of calcium really bad for low speed pre-ignition so that's a positive change and dbn to me is something that is a a dinosaur it's a relic from the past that was for high salt refuels I know there are some places in the world if it's still a high price over fuel so I'll put a big asterisk on my statement there uh that if you have high sulfur pupils it is something you need to watch but if you're you know in Australia you're in North America you don't have ice over fuels uh don't worry about TB and that's not what you need to be focused on you know in fact you know these race oil because of that super low detergent level I mean we would have oils that if you look at the the total Base number brand new it'd be like 1.7 you know two out of the bottle you know with an acid level almost the same but a lot of times when you had very high spring loads you you actually needed true EP additives so you had to have some active sulfur in the oil so when you were formulating that oil and that's one thing we did uh you know obviously working with lupus all we didn't have to start with an additive package we weren't starting with a pcmo and then you know down treating it adding stuff to it we always from day one component formulated every oil we never used a DI package we made the oils component by component so you know normal race oil blend made out of 14 or 15 different components in it in including you know all the base oils and code base stocks and stuff but to me that's what gave us a really great Insight uh into how it was worked

Channel: Lubrication Explained

Views: 9,406

Keywords: Lubricants, Lubrication, Reliability, Machinery, Engineering, Assets, Maintenance

Id: 0t_qc4lsCfk

Length: 6min 19sec (379 seconds)

Published: Mon May 29 2023