Putting a Completely New Engine Oil Chemistry in a Cummins Engine

imagine that a company comes to you and says we've developed a revolutionary new engine oil you're skeptical but you're willing to try it out they give you the oil and it looks like this it's got a bit of a greenish tinge to it you think well plenty of companies put dyes in their oils for marketing purposes but what's special about this so you do an oil analysis test and you find zinc Z parts per million phosphorus zero parts per million calcium zero magnesium zero at this point you're thinking do they just sell me base oil and forget to put the additives in then copper turns up at 250 parts per million that's unusual because usually copper in something like an engine oil is a bad thing it's indicative of bearing wear but 250 is extraordinarily high so it must mean the additive package there's no TBN to speak of so very little in the terms of detergency then you got an acid number that starts off two that's all completely backwards from everything we know about engine oils and the Killer saps 0.07% by weight that's for all intensive purposes zero when you compare it to both the mid and the low saps engine oils that are currently available on the market now if you've been following this channel for the last couple of months you'll know that I came across a startup company who thinks that they've cracked a new kind of way of approaching engine oils and we spent the first episode kind of discussing how it's supposed to work in theory and then we tested out on a very small scale so we bought a motorbike engine and had it run at a third party independent testing laboratory this time we're scaling up so we've validated that it works in a motorbike engine and we want to prove that it works in a much heavier Duty application so this small startup company called neoc copper Technologies put their money where their mouth is and they bought themselves a cumin X12 heavyduty diesel engine they took it to a third party independent testing laboratory it's a German outfit that's well known in our circles and they had it run on a test stand and hooked this thing up to all kind kind of instrumentation so that we could get readings on everything from friction wear as well as emissions power and torque output now let's step back for a little bit and ask ourselves why is this actually a big deal why why do we need kind of a step change in engine oil technology when you look at the way that engine oils are formulated they really start off with kind of a a known chemical box if you look at any oil analysis test you'll tend to find that they contain zinc phosphorus calcium magnesium Molly and boron in some relative proportions and if you looked at some of the early engine oil formulations they contained a stack of zinc and phosphorus remember they are the Zed and P in zddp as well as calcium which provided both the TBN as well as the detergency as we've moved on we've slowly started to reduce the amount of zinc and phosphorus and that's for emissions control reasons but we were always playing at the margins and maybe we were using primary instead of secondary zddps and we were altering the chemistry a little bit to refine it a little bit more then as we moved on we might have elevated the amount of boron that might have been because zddp is both an anti-war as well as an antioxidant and you know sometimes we have to compensate with performance either from some kind of Bor dester or maybe instead we were adding some other kind of antioxidant to the formulation then for example we might have reduced the amount of zinc and phosphorus but made up for it with Molly we know now that Molly and zinc work what we call synergistically together so it gives you our 1 + 1 = 3 effect and that's often why you'll see Molly in in some of the more modern engine oils then we moved on to turbocharged direct injection engines we found that lspi was a problem so we're having to pull back on the calcium and increase the amount of magnesium detergents now let's say you wanted a very low saps formulation well Ash is created by metallic components if you pull down on the zinc and you want to keep the phosphorous High the only way to do that is to use ashless antiwear that is phosphorus based and then maybe you compensate for the lost of antioxidants by increasing the amount of boron or increasing the amount of some other antioxidant the point is that we're always playing at the margins so you could say that an exercise in engine oil formulation we're really just kind of adjusting levers up and down what neol is suggesting is that we need to wipe the Slate clean and introduce a completely new chemistry now if you're going to introduce a new chemistry you have to validate that number one it works and number two it's not going to cause any harmful effects to the engine and so that's what this is really all about now for this to be believable and credible we have to have a very rigorous testing regime so we're going to start with a new engine that needs to be broken in and commissioned and so we'll start with a standard OEM approved oil run the engine on that for a little while and then we're going to do a handful of what we call functional tests now those functional tests are to test things like power torque and temperature to make sure that when it's running on the neol oil it's comparable to the OEM approved oil then looking at a mapping test so breake specific fuel consumption so what Neil is trying to show you here is okay maybe the performance of the oil Stacks up but if you have to pay for that with an increase in fuel consumption then that's not a very good trade-off so showing that the brake specific fuel consumption stays even is very important friction torque to be able to demonstrate that we're not adversely introducing a whole bunch of friction into the engine and if we can get a benefit then that's an absolute Advantage obviously one of the reasons why we're looking at a low saps formulation is for emissions criteria and so what we want to demonstrate with an additional test is that there is no adverse effect on emissions finally we need to do some oil analysis to prove that the oil is in good Nick and identify if there's any wear metals and finally a cylinder endoscopy or you might call it a boroscope is going to confirm the condition of the inside of the engine so that's the testing criteria for these three functional tests and after going through it all and a number of different drains here's what I think are some pretty encouraging results so the first test is engine power how much power is the engine producing over basically the entire rev range and what they were able to show was if anything there was actually a slight increase in engine power now I don't know that the number was large enough that you could say it's statistically significant but at the very least there's no decrease in engine power as a result of using this new chemistry then we obviously want to check torque torque and power intimately related and again checking over the entire rev range there was a very slight increase in torque over the Rev range like I said we want to check brake specific fuel consumption and here the difference is almost negligible 182 G per kwatt hour versus 183 G per kwatt hour in terms of friction again very little difference between the Neo chemistry as well as the OEM approved oil so again that's good right it's showing that we're not entirely dependent on that old chemistry to get the results that we want and then finally we had the emissions test in which it was run over both a cold as well as a hot standardized cycle they measured all the emissions and were able to show there was no significant difference between the emissions on the OEM approved oil as well as this new Neo technology okay so now you've got the performance criteria out out of the way one of the next things that you want to do is test engine durability and really the way to do that on a test stand is to do it through what we would call an oem endurance test so we run the engine at fairly heavy load for a very long period of time and see what the results are and here is where I think things get quite interesting because look at the oil analysis results I've now got on screen both the new as well as the used 10w30 engine oil and there's a couple of things that we can tease out so as oil enthusiasts might say there's a couple of things that I think will be super interesting to the audience number one we said that TBN was close to zero and what they're showing is that the new oil has a TBN of about 1.1 one thing we know is that when you get to very very low TBN levels it's actually quite difficult to measure TBN and there's a lot of inaccuracy that occurs at low TBN levels so I wouldn't put too much stock in that effectively there is no overbased detergent in this formulation so that's the first thing to note the second thing to note is that the total acid number actually went down now this is highly unusual not only in engine oils but in lubricants in general because generally acid number goes up as a result of contaminants so in fuels if we burn things like sulfur we produce h204 which is sulfuric acid and we create oxidation products as the byproduct of exposure to air as well as high temperatures and the acid number increases in the very rare circumstances where total acid number decreases it's generally because there are are acidic components in the oil that is to say acidic additives and as they are consumed the acid number goes down now I can tell you and I haven't shown it on the screen here that the oxidation value stayed basically zero throughout this test and I wouldn't have expected it to go out by a whole lot what we're saying is very little oxidation that has occurred and why do we care about oxidation because we care about changes in viscosity and as you can see here the KV 100 which is the top line has stayed pretty stable okay one other thing that's very interesting is the ash number okay like I said 07 06 it's effectively zero up until this point we haven't really had anything that's below about4 right and that's almost a 10-fold increase from where we are now and I'll explain why that's so important at the end of the video then we've got water this formulation seems to be quite hygroscopic which is to say it pulls water out of the atmosphere and you'll see that the new oil value had a water value of about 3 80 and it reduces in use that would suggest that when the engine gets up to operating temperature it's starting to boil some of that water off now we getting to the wear Metals now iron in the used oil sample looks a little bit high at 90 parts per million but remember this is a relatively new engine and it's still going through the running in process if you got questions hold that thought cuz I've got more to show you in a second copper is really interesting because obviously in this circumstance it's an additive and not a wear metal or a cont contaminant typically when we see very high levels of copper in heavyduty diesel engines we would be concerned right cuz it's either corrosion of the oil cooler or it's aware of the bearings in this case though a very high number is reflective of the additive package next you've got Boron now in this case Boron seems to be some kind of additive and it's depleted quite a lot it's gone from 256 down to 25 again hold that thought we're going to explain a little bit more in a second and then finally on the standard items that you would typically see in an oil additive package virtually zero now you might wonder why are we seeing 16 10 and 12 on calcium phosphorus and zinc for the used oil and that's really residual that was left over from the original oil that was in the engine and which the engine was running on so that's the OEM approved oil now we've got one more surprise in store because after we had done all of the testing so all the functional testing as well as endurance testing neol said why don't we try pull one more trick out of the bag let's see what happens if we reduce the viscosity a bit can our specialized copper antiwear additive compensate for the slight loss in viscosity and will we see the same kind of performance out of a 0 w30 rather than a 10w30 and again I think the results are really interesting so first of all you can see that the KV 100 is slightly lower for the Z w30 but this time this is why I said just hold on to your opinions about iron for for a moment cuz now that the engine has been completely run in the levels of iron wear are now sitting around about 19 so that's really good considering that we've dropped the viscosity slightly in a in a similar way the Boron additive hasn't depleted as much and that's probably got to do with the fact that now the engine's been running on the same kind of chemistry for a little while remember this is a radically different chemistry from the standard oils that you will see on the market today and finally because all of that original approved OEM oil is now out of the system the standard additive levels of calcium magnesium phosphorus and zinc they're all now zero now oil analysis is all well and good but you also have to show that the engine looks good on the inside so they did have a look on the inside and I'd say that these images look pretty clean um now the engine's not super old so you're not expecting a huge amount of wear but again this is validation that we can run an engine on an entirely different additive chemistry than what is currently available on the market now the big question is why is this significant like why do we actually care about this no one asked for a completely clean slate engine oil now the reason this is significant is we have been chasing lower saps formulations for the last 30 to 40 years we know that phosphorus and sulfur poison catalysts we know that the ash clogs DPF filters and so everyone has been looking to minimize these levels but if you look at the evolution for example of the AA sequences you can see from 2002 all the way through to 2022 the E sequences for heavyduty engines the limits have not significantly changed since 2002 in 2002 we set a maximum level of saps by weight at 2% and all that we did in 2004 is release E6 which had a 1% maximum since then most heavyduty diesel engine oils max out that level so if they want an E6 or an E9 or an E11 or an E8 they use 1% Ash now I only know of a single company that has really chased what they call an ultr low saps additive package and that's Chevron or calex depending on what region you're in their Del 68f that product has an ash level of 4% by weight so what we're doing here is we're showing a drastic drop because the thing is if you if we continue along this trajectory where everyone either has an allowable value of two or one tweaking at the margins of the currently available technology is never going to get us to a proper zero saps formulation it's only by wiping the Slate clean and starting over again that we can get anywhere near that level in the next decade or two now that's why I think this is a really really big deal now the story is not done one test orbe it a very comprehensive test one test does not prove that this is a technology which can completely upend the rest of the world it gets us some of the way there but there's still a lot of more evidence that needs to be built and Neil is completely committed to this so they're already looking at the next round of testing and if you happen to have a fleet and maybe want to test this out in the real world then definitely get in touch because at some stage this is going to have to make its way into fully fledged vehicles and we're going to need to do real world uncontrolled testing this really is a very promising new engine oil technology and I'm really excited to see where it leads us

Channel: Lubrication Explained

Views: 3,071

Keywords: Cummins, Diesel Engines, Engine Oil, Lubricants, Motor Oil, Oil

Id: 8o69CyyVOXQ

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024