Ashfree chemistry provides new opportunities to manage cylinder lube oil

摘要

The latest OEM recommendations for new engine technologies, the recently applied regulation in Emission Controlled Areas (ECA) and the vessel's operational constraints are putting pressure on the cylinder lube oil (CLO). It results in a blow-up of the CLO specifications and in the multiplication of parameters to manage, in line with the number of lubricants used. Obvious practical reasons are limiting the number of products that can be used on-board which can lead to risky or critical situations in terms of engine lubrication. In the aim of providing simple and reliable solutions for the lubrication of slow speed modern engines in this constraining environment, Total Lubmarine is developing new CLO formulations based on the so-called Ashfree Neutralizing Molecules (ANM). Such molecules bring basicity among other properties, without creating any deposit like the calcium based products regularly used in CLO. A new method call EBAS (Efficient BASicity) is used to quantify the basicity of non-calcium containing components such as ANM. The EBAS method, under standardization process, is complementary to the ASTM D-2896 method already used to define the total basicity content, or Base Number (BN) of a lubricant. The presentation also reports the results of thousands of hours of field testing with new a new generation of single-cylinder oil based on the ANM chemistry, with more particular attention paid on vessels using high sulphur HFO.