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Lubricant Base Oil and Wax Processing Avilino Sequeira
Publisher: CRC Press

Provides state-of-the-art information on all processes currently used to manufacture lubricant base oils and waxes-offering practical, timesaving solutions for specific on-the-job problems. For the most part, four of the eight, representing greases, wax-based drip lubes, regular oils, and biodegradeable oils, were all very similar, losing about 2 watts over the hour long test.'. The significant increase in lube yield over competitive technologies, the ultra-clean finished products, and broad feedstock flexibility propelled ISODEWAXING to become the preferred dewaxing process for lubricant base oil production in the world. The secret I was made privy to was that waxing your chain was preferable to using oil type lubricants as far as cleanliness was concerned. In lubricating oils, this wax is removed in a refining process called dewaxing. The distillation process in the refinery separates the hydrocarbons contained in the crude into cuts based on the molecule size. There are those who claim a waxed chain will not last as long as a chain lubricated with modern synthetic oils (probably the manufacturers of those products), but anecdotal evidence seems to support the contrary. Paraffinic hydrocarbons are the best lubricants. Furthermore, as many unwanted substances as possible are removed in the process, such as sulphur, aromatic hydrocarbons, paraffin wax, etc. Now this recent news from Amyris is pretty interesting since I used to cover a little bit of the base oil industry when I wrote articles for Chemical Market Reporter before on lubricants, greases and waxes. Instead of removing wax molecules (as in solvent dewaxing) or cracking them to light C3-C8 hydrocarbons (as in classic catalytic dewaxing), the ISODEWAXING® Catalyst isomerizes the wax molecules into lube oil. In other words the mineral oil production process is physical cleaning and the end product is so-called paraffinic base oil. Over time, the wax gets nasty to the point that you feel compelled to replace it lest you re-introduce the contaminants in the waxing process.