Tribological behavior as lubricant additive and physiochemical characterization of Jatropha oil blends
Friction
2223-7690
Tribological behavior as lubricant additive and physiochemical characterization of Jatropha oil blends
Yashvir SINGH 0
0 Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering Studies, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies , Dehradun 248007, India Received: 02 September 2015 / Revised: 13 November 2015 / Accepted: 18 November 2015 © The author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
This investigation reports on the effect of Jatropha oil doped with lube oil on tribological characteristics of Al-7%Si alloy. The factors involved were Jatropha oil percentages, sliding velocities and load which was optimized for weight loss, friction coefficient and specific wear rate characteristics. The conventional lubricant was SAE 40. It is observed that the Jatropha oil percentage factor had significant influence on the weight loss, friction coefficient and wear rate of the pin. The optimum result was A2 B3 C1 for pin weight loss, friction coefficient and wear rate. From the experimental result, it is found that the wear scar diameter increases with the increase of load for lube oil and reduced by addition of percentage of Jatropha oil. Flash temperature parameter was also studied in this experiment and results show that 15% addition of Jatropha oil would result in less possibility to film breakdown. The overall results of this experiment reveal that the addition of 15% Jatropha oil with base lubricant produces better performance and anti-wear characteristics. This blend can be used as lubricant oil which is environment friendly in nature and would help to reduce petroleum based lubricant substantially.
Taguchi; ANOVA; pin weight loss; friction coefficient; wear rate
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Around the globe, there are challenges for the industries
involved in manufacturing petroleum based lubricant
products to face government regulations and also
meet latest technological changes to make cleaner
environment and reduce pollution caused by them
[
1, 2
]. There are various lubricants available around
the world which include synthetic oil, mineral oil and
vegetable oil. Lubricants available in the market, i.e.,
mineral oil are derived from crude petroleum oils
and are not feasible with the environment as they are
non-biodegradable and toxic [
3, 4
]. Also, the disposal
of mineral caused pollution to the aquatic and
terrestrial ecosystems and combustion of the mineral
oil leads to emission of metal traces like calcium, zinc,
magnesium and phosphorous and nano-particles
[
5, 6
]. Vegetable oil can be used as an alternative to
petroleum based mineral oil as it possesses several
advantages which include biodegradability, lower
toxicity, lower volatility and higher lubricity [
7, 8
]. They
have triacylglycerol structure which contains long,
polar fatty acid composition resulting into formation
of thick film between the metal to metal contacts and
imparting them better anti wear properties [
9, 10
].
There are some drawbacks of vegetable oil based
lubricants that they have lower thermal/oxidative
stability, higher flash point and high temperature
operability leading to higher coefficient of friction
[
11
]. To overcome these limitations, several researches
have been carried out. Oxidation stability and low pour
point can be modified by partially adding additives
and using N-Phenyl-alpha-naphthylamine (Am2) as
antioxidant to improve oxidation stability [
12−14
].
Moreover, transesterification or epoxidation are the
solutions to meliorate oxidation stability at low
temperature [
15, 16
]. To make vegetable oil based lubricant
sustainable, there is a need to improve their narrow
range of viscosities [17]. Viscosity is one of the significant
factor in determining coefficient of friction between the
sliding surfaces as it acts as protective film between
the surfaces in contact to protect them from wear. To
do so, viscosity modifiers can also be used which are
friendly with environment. Oleogels based on
conventional, bio-based lubricant and ethylene-vinyl acetate
(EVA) copolymer have been developed. It has been
observed that EVA can be used as an effective thickener
agent to make vegetable oil as bio-based lubricant [
18
].
Viscosity of bio-based lubricant can also be increased
by using ethylene-vinyl acetate and
styrene-butadienestyrene copolymers as they increase some amount of
kinematic viscosities at 40 °C and 100 °C [
19
].
Taguchi’s orthogonal array method is a statistical
technique under design of experiments which reduces
number of experiment trials and provides sufficient
information about the effect of control factors [
20, 21
].
According to this method, various control factors can
be investigated at a time and resulted in optimum
significant values. The advantages of using Taguchi
method have been reported by various authors [
22−27
].
The following is the overview of the literature based
on involvement of lubricants using design of
experiments. Silica (...truncated)