More Zinc = More Wear? The REAL Truth About ZDDP Additives

so does the amount of zinc in your oil really matter we're here at Southwest research and we're working with total seal and rler Manufacturing to find out the true effects of zdp we all call it zinc but their technical name is zinc dialy theop phosphate that's hard to say so we just call it zinc [Music] instead is more zdp actually better is there too much possible zdp we're going to find out the answers we're going to study the effect of zinc levels in oils on piston ring and cylinder boore wear this little device back here it's called a te e77 it's a reciprocating rig we can take a piece of cylinder and a piece of a piston ring and rub them together at the same Heats and the loads and speeds that you see in an actual engine and it takes away all the other variables so we then we can analyze that used oil and actually see how much wear is occurring not only by measuring the liner and the ring but also measuring the Weare Metals in the used oil so this is going to give us the idea of what's actually happening in that engine and what those zinc levels actually [Music] do so before we get into the results let's talk about what zinc Act actually is and more importantly how it works because that's the key to understanding the results we're going to show you in this video so zddp works because it's a polar molecule which means it's attracted to any iron of sparis surface but it's not a lubricant yet see the zinc has to react with that iron surface under heat and load to create the sacrificial film one of the best analogies I remember hearing is that the guys at Luol of their videos said it's like snow falling on the Rocky Mountains if you look at the Rocky Mountains in the summertime when there's no snow on them they look really rough and Jagged well every smooth surface under a microscope is actually rough there's Peaks and valleys that zdp film that reaction film is like the snow falling on the Rockies creating this smoother rounding it out that way there's more contact area and also it provides a film that can wear a way to sacrificially protect the metal below it that way there isn't scuffing scoring or ging so zdp polar it goes to the surface reacts with that surface and creates that protective film now it's important to understand that protective film does not reduce friction in fact it does the opposite typically increases friction I know you're saying what hang on you just said it reduces wear yes zdp reduces wear but it doesn't reduce friction friction and wear are two independent phenomenon just because you reduce friction doesn't mean you reduce wear just because you reduce wear doesn't mean you reduce friction and we're going to show you that here in just a second again this channel it's about science not speculation I'm not just going to tell you these things we're going to show you the proof of these things but again it's important to understand what zdp is how it works now back to the question at hand how much zdp is too much zdp because at a low level of zdp you have adhesive Weare you don't have enough zdp to create that film to protect the surfaces so you're going to have scuffing scoring and ging which is why it's important that an oil has zdp as an engine oil especially for flat Tapp of cams and things like that which is why you're probably watching this video in the first place so lowlevel of zdp very high level of adhesive wear as that level of zdp increases wear decreases to a point but as you begin to add more zdp wear begins to increase again and now it's corrosive wear remember like I said zdp has to react with that surface to create that film but what can happen is those films can become so thick that they just Slough right off if you've ever had to scrape paint you'll probably know that when the paint is really thin it's really hard to scrape it off but if the paint's really thick it just scrapes off quite easily so you can imagine if you have these super super thick films and you have a high load it just scrapes that zdp film right away but when it does that it's actually taking some of that metal that it reacted with away at the same time [Music] so here's a real world example of how too much zdp can actually cause a failure this customer broke in the engine with a 1,200 Park per million zdp breaking oil ran for 30 minutes they checked the Vive lash everything was good cam didn't fail they changed the oil and they put in an oil with a boosted amount of zdp 3600 parts per million zdp and they failed the cam shaft within 5 minutes perfect example of how too much of even a good thing is actually bad which is why I never recommend using any brand of zdp additive in your oil because it could do exactly what you don't want it to do which is increase wear there is such a thing as too much zdp so it can actually increase friction and increase wear if you have too much zdp so it's not about having more zdp it's about having the right amount of zdp for the application so that being said let's go ahead and jump into the results from our ring onliner [Music] tester to illustrate the effect of zdp on where we chose a couple of different oils we can compare with they're kind of polar opposite so let's get into the detail of those formulations before we show you the wear and friction result so the first one we're using is a break-in oil so that's a high zdp but low detergent because the detergents as we mentioned before they're also polar molecules they compete against the zinc that zinc isn't Alone actor here that that balance between the zinc and the other additives is just as important to that zinc content by itself which is why you should never just buy an oil off the zinc content alone you got to look at the complete package in order to know hey is this the right type of oil for my application it's not zinc alone it's the balance of the overall additive package what you need to look for so in this case we're looking at breaking oil which is a very low detergent 376 parts per million calcium and then we're looking at 1567 parts per million of the phosphorus because while we all talk about zinc it's really the phosphorous part of the zinc the zddp that actually does the real work so we're going to focus on the phosphorus levels here not so much the zinc levels because they go hand in hand you can't have phosphorus without zinc or zinc without phosphorus in terms of zddp looking at the apis oil it's 1,700 parts per million calcium so there's as much calcium in that oil as there is zdp essentially in the other oil but the phosphorus is only 764 so I said they're kind of Polar Opposites they're not exact but for off-the-shelf products you can purchase they gave us a pretty good comparison one of the things you may notice here on the page is we're not just showing the oil by itself we're also showing the ring and the liner why is that because the surface roughness the material of the Ring itself matters on how that oil works so like I said the zdp isn't alone the oil isn't alone remember it's called motor oil for a reason because the oil has to go the metal energy the surface roughness of the motor makes a huge difference in how the oil works I know couple big knowledge bombs in this video friction and wear aren't the same thing and how the oil works is really dependent upon the Metallurgy and the surface finish of the engine you're putting the oil in if you would like me to make a video that really dicks into those details I'd be happy to just mention it in the comments below but for now let's keep moving forward and look at this comparison a little bit we've also added in a high performance oil so an oil that has 1300 parts per million calcium along with 948 parts per million zinc so more zinc than the API minimum so here's the zinc level timeline API passenger car grades that's 10 w30 and lower have been limited to 800 parts per million maximum since 2005 now the viscosity grade's higher than that say from a 040 all the way through a 10w 60 they can have up to 1,200 parts per million since 2005 which happens to be the same amount that diesel oils have been limited to since 2010 but not all dies oils have up to 1200 parts per million we'll leave a link in the description box below for a video about that but just know that diesel oils the maximum they can have is 1,200 parts per million your API grades 040 through 1060 they're maxed out at 1,00 parts per million and anything that the 10 W 30 or lower viscosity is maxed out at 800 parts per million if all that wasn't enough the type of zinc use also changed in 2010 that's right there's more than one type of zinc there's primary there's secondary there's short chain there's long chain there's all these different formulas and today in GM dexos one and apis spec oils they use a phosphorus retention formula zdp which is more friendly to catalytic converters so that being said let's go ahead and jump into the fun part which is we're going to begin with the friction curves on each of these little sets of oils so set number one is our API SP oil versus the Breakin oil with the rough honed surface along with we'll call it ring B and you can see that the oil that has the lowest friction has the highest amount of wear like I said I wasn't going to tell you these things we're going to show you these things and you can see that that higher level of friction from the breaking oil that has that higher level of zdp is producing much less wear 33 parts per million of iron compared to 142 parts per million of iron but the friction response is completely different that higher level of zdp is providing that excellent protection but it's also generating more friction due to that thicker film from that higher level of zdp so we flip it over that lower level of zdp with this really rough surface man it's just not enough zdp and we're having that adhesive wear we showed in that earlier graph now we can slide over and take a look at the 3D profilometer images cuz that's what the Fric from running these parts and that's the used oil analysis the amount of iron in that used oil that's giving us the wear but we can also look at the wear scar itself and that's what we see right here that's a 3D image of a stripe right down the middle cuz remember that piston ring is rubbing back and forth against that section of cylinder wall so now we can go and take a little stripe right down the middle of that and we can look at it and you can see those two ends where it's really red on the end that's the unrunnable stages of lubrication every single cycle that's why I love piston rings right because every single cycle that piston ring experiences all three stages of lubrication boundary mixed hydrodynamic in the middle that's hydrodynamic that's that full film of oil but as it gets closer to ring reversal it begins to slow down now it transitions from that full film into mixed film then when it comes right to the the very end and it stops now it's in boundary condition and in boundary that's where the additive package matters the most and you can see the most amount of wear and you can see that back and forth and of course the one on top that's where the breaking oil is and you can see it's doing a really good job of protecting that surface that rough surface but down at the bottom that lower level of zdp man it's ugly so at this point you're like well wow this is obviously a slam dunk case you got to have more zdp it's better which it was that easy so remember that was the rough hone with ring B now let's take a look at what happens when we change only the ring and the liner surface thinness so we're going to change the ring material and we're going to change the surface finish the liner oils are all going to be the same we'll even add in that high performance oil and let's see what happens so from a friction perspective huge difference the scale of all of these are the exact same so you can see there's a lot less friction even with the breaking oil there's lower friction this time around but that higher level of zdp oil you can see that as the load increases that little Jagged line in the middle that's the load step well now all of a sudden it flips over where the apis oil was having higher friction before once that load kept up well that zdp reacted even stronger but they're both lower friction than the breaking oil this case what's interesting is we know before well friction and wear are two different things so what happens when we start looking at the wear on these pairs so we look at the break-in oil it actually has 15 parts per million iron so that smoother surface with that different ring coating now there's much less wear overall even with the breaking oil but now all of a sudden we're down to six parts per million iron with the apis that's right just changing the ring and the liner we went from 142 parts per million and this thing looking dog ugly to six parts per million iron and the surface looks beautiful what's the difference it wasn't the oil the oil is the exact same it's the fact that tribology is the study of friction wear and lubrication and it's all of them coming together it's not just the oil it's not just the ring it's not just the liner it's not just the roughness it's all of them and how they work together that makes the difference and these results clearly show that even that little higher level of zdp even with added Molly with the high performance Oil we're at basically 10 parts per million and let's be honest six 10 those are about the same and you look at the wear scar they look really similar it's hard to tell the two apart that's what's really the neat thing about doing this kind of testing it lets you go beyond just what you see on the data sheets right because I've said it before in other videos I love the science of oil I hate oil marketing all these companies make these claims about friction reduction or wear or this or that they're not telling you the whole story and the reality is you don't know what it's going to do in your engine because if you're like me I don't know what ring material is in my well actually I do know what ring material is in my engine but most people don't know what ring material is in their engine they don't know what surface finish or material theore is so I know what's in mine but I still don't know how those oils are going to respond to that until I put them in my engine and I run them and I let the usual analysis tell me what's going on in my engine does it like that oil or not and just because you get better fuel economy with that oil lower friction doesn't mean you're getting less wear in that engine some of them of these were really scary looking actually so just know that there's a there is a difference between friction and wear and how oils respond in different tribological environments because that's what an engine is it's a tribological environment we have different materials we have different roughnesses we have different speeds and loads all these things creating different well films so it's a very complex environment which means the answer is always going to be dependent upon the application there is no one size fits all best oil it does not exist that's what the oil marketers want you to think but they're wrong and that's why I said before I love the science of tribology I hate oil marketing and I think these results kind of reveal that and like I mentioned earlier let's go ahead and take a look at that Nano additive and I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that so using our breaking oil as our reference because it's nice and consistent in terms of friction and we know that it does a pretty good job in terms of wear with this ring and liner combination we're at 20 parts per million iron with the breaking oil now let's add our Nano additive the idea of these Nano particles is they're going to act like you know Nano ball bearings and then we're going to reduce friction and reduce wear well in this case it did reduce friction you can see that green line is lower level of friction than the gry line but it also increased wear we go from 20 parts per million of wear to 51 parts per million wear so here are the four things you're engine wants you to know from this video number one too much of even a good thing is a bad thing that's right too much zinc can actually increase wear which is the whole reason you wanted to have a high zinc oil to begin with and that higher level of zinc can actually increase friction we learned friction and wear are two independent phenomenon so if you're trying to make the most power you may not want the most zinc what you want is the right balance of additives for the application that higher level of Zinc at Breakin is a good thing but you don't want it all the time which is why don't play backyard chemist don't put any additives in your oil your engine will thank you for more like this stay tuned [Music]

Channel: The Motor Oil Geek

Views: 250,598

Keywords: Zinc, Zink, ZDDP, ZDP, zinc motor oil, high zinc motor oil, zink motor oil, high zink motor oil, flat tappet cam, flat tappet cam failure, flat tappet camshaft, camshaft failure, camshaft failure motor oil, zinc oil additive, zink oil additive, motor oil additive, nano additive, nano motor oil additive, motor oil, synthetic motor oil, friction, wear, tribology

Id: erxjPicpYyw

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024