Top 8 Strategic Imperatives Transforming the World of Lubricants

Lubricants are not just essential for the smooth operation and longevity of industrial equipment; they are the driving force behind industrial growth. For instance, in the automotive industry, the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) relies heavily on advanced lubrication to ensure that each mechanical component operates seamlessly and with minimal friction. Beyond automotive applications, lubricants are crucial in sectors such as off-highway construction equipment, manufacturing, and metal and mining.

For a deep dive into the dynamic lubricants domain, click here to access Frost & Sullivan’s latest growth opportunity analysis on the subject.

Despite the lucrative nature and extensive impact of the lubricants industry, its growth trajectory is being influenced by the rise of sustainability as a megatrend, supply chain challenges, and evolving regulations. To navigate this dynamic landscape and achieve long-term success, industry leaders are focusing on key strategic imperatives.

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Let’s explore the top 8 imperatives revolutionizing the lubricants industry:

Transformative Megatrends

Embracing the Circular Economy: The shift towards a circular economy and reducing reliance on fossil-fuel raw materials is driving interest in bio-based and recycled lubricants. These innovative alternatives are not only facilitating green solutions but also offering high technical performance, benefiting ecosystem players.

Driving the EV Transformation with eFluids: The rapid growth in EV sales, projected to continue throughout this decade and the next, is propelling the development of ‘EV-compatible’ fluids or eFluids. The advancement of such specialized lubricants, including engine oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, hydraulic fluid, and greases, is proving key to widespread adoption of EVs.

Disruptive Technologies

Innovations in Lubricant-Free Polymer Bearings: Polymer bearings are emerging as a game-changer. Companies like igus GmbH offer maintenance-free bearings that are self-lubricating and function in dry conditions. Such technology prevents dirt buildup and reduces maintenance costs, providing a clean and efficient alternative.

Harnessing Automation Technology: Automatic lubrication systems are emerging as cost-effective alternatives that counter the inefficiencies of manual processes. This shift is particularly significant for developing economies like APAC and India, which are becoming attractive industrial hubs. Automation ensures consistent and cost-effective lubrication, enhancing equipment performance and longevity.

Adopting Nanotechnology for lubricant additives: Nanotechnology is revolutionizing additives, creating nano-lubricants that decrease wear-and-tear, enhance lubrication performance, and guarantee enhanced lifespan. These advancements also contribute to emission reduction, aligning with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.

Is your organization utilizing these strategic imperatives to enhance your competitive advantage within this dynamic ecosystem?

Innovative Business Models

The Rise of Lubrication-as-a-Service (LaaS): The LaaS model is transforming how companies approach machinery lubrication by offering a service-based solution, as opposed to a traditional product-driven approach. With real-time or continuous monitoring, LaaS ensures lubrication is provided precisely when and where it is needed, optimizing equipment performance and reducing downtime.

Competitive Intensity

Emergence of Startups Specializing in Sustainable Lubricants: Startups focusing on innovative and eco-friendly solutions are disrupting traditional industry dynamics. This shift is particularly evident in the bio-based automotive lubricants sector, where competition and the demand for sustainability are driving rapid innovation and strategic responses from established players.

Internal Challenges

Adapting to Rapidly Changing Regulatory Environments: Ecosystem players are continually adapting to evolving global regulations, which, in turn, is impacting their product formulations and growth strategies. Navigating these regulatory landscapes, often governed by environmental standards and stricter fuel and engine oil specifications, is proving imperative for maintaining a competitive edge.

In conclusion, the lubricants industry is experiencing significant transformations driven by technological advancements, sustainability initiatives, and evolving customer demands. By focusing on strategic partnerships, understanding regulatory shifts, and embracing innovative business models, companies can position themselves for success in this dynamic landscape. The future of the lubricants industry looks promising, with exciting opportunities for growth and innovation.

With these imperatives as your guide, what key growth opportunities and transformative megatrends will you leverage to propel your growth journey?

If you’re unsure where to begin, Frost & Sullivan’s team of growth experts is on hand to assist you in tackling and overcoming the challenges posed by the strategic imperatives highlighted earlier, while identifying fresh growth prospects for your organization.

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When added to base oils, the ILs demonstrated 50% less friction and a tenfold decrease in equipment wear compared to a commercially available gear oil, while meeting federal standards for environmental toxicity and biodegradability, as described in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering

The project builds on more than 20 years of IL research at ORNL, including the development of lubricant additives designed to reduce engine wear and boost fuel economy in vehicles. 

“Our previous work showed us that you could dramatically increase the performance of lubricants with the addition of just 1% or even a half-percent of ILs,” said ORNL’s Jun Qu, who leads the project and the Surface Engineering and Tribology group at ORNL. 

This time around, scientists sought to create a nontoxic additive for use in turbines installed in aquatic environments, generating electricity using waves, tides, ocean and river currents. Although ILs are generally considered less toxic than conventional lubricant ingredients, their impact on the environment has not been closely studied. 

“On the environmental side, there are three main factors we care about with these lubricants,” said Teresa Mathews, lead for the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health group at ORNL. “They have to be highly performing, we don’t want them to be toxic to any aquatic organisms, and if there’s a spill, we don’t want the lubricants to be compounds that last in the environment. We want them to degrade very rapidly.”

Pursuing a cleaner formula 

The team first sought to eliminate potential toxic elements such as fluorine and chlorine and metals such as zinc and iron from the candidate ILs. They also focused on creating ILs made up of shorter hydrocarbon chains — chains containing fewer than six carbon atoms — which are generally considered to be less toxic. 

“We found a four-carbon chain to be the sweet spot,” Qu said. Going shorter than four carbons resulted in an IL that didn’t mix well with oil and was less thermally stable, he added.

Friction testing was accomplished with metal pieces simulating turbine gears and bearings coated with a lubricant containing the IL. Resulting surface wear of the pieces was characterized using electron microscopy at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL. 

These particular ILs are fairly straightforward to produce and can be easily scaled up for commercialization, said Huimin Luo, a chemist in ORNL’s Manufacturing Science Division who led the chemical synthesis work. 

To determine the additives’ environmental impact, ORNL ecotoxicologist Louise Stevenson conducted toxicity and biodegradability tests in ORNL’s Environmental Toxicology Laboratory, where assessments are routinely conducted for DOE, the Department of Defense and other agencies. Following Environmental Protection Agency protocols, the toxicity tests used Ceriodaphnia, tiny planktonic crustaceans commonly known as water fleas that sit at the bottom of the food chain, have a short life cycle and rapid reproduction rate, and are highly sensitive to environmental conditions. 

Tiny plankton provide big insights

The organisms “are like canaries in a coal mine for aquatic toxicity because they are filter feeders and interact with a lot of water,” Stevenson said. “In a seven-day test, we’ll get three to four rounds of reproduction with daily hatching, so we can look for both lethal effects and sublethal effects such as reproductive and growth impacts that have an effect on population survival.” 

While the environmentally acceptable lubricant base oils had no effect on the crustaceans, the commercial lubricant additives and two early IL compounds were found to be extremely toxic to the organisms, resulting in 100% mortality within one to three days after exposure. The team’s ultimate designs for short-chain ammonium phosphate and phosphonium phosphate IL additives resulted in 90-100% survival rates after seven days.

The final, top-performing IL-enhanced lubricants were also found to be highly biodegradable compared to standard lubricant additives. Testing involved exposing the compounds to aquatic microbes and then measuring the rate of carbon dioxide production as the microbes broke down the materials.

High-performing, environmentally friendly lubricants designed specifically for marine energy turbines are important for other reasons, including equipment durability. Lubricant technology currently in use for marine turbines was borrowed from wind turbines, which are serviced every six to 18 months, Qu said. But tidal turbines installed in the ocean or rivers are typically designed for service every six years and operate under much harsher conditions. 

The project is expected to next focus on further development of IL lubricant additives specifically for use in tidal turbines operating in the ocean and exposed to potential seawater contamination and pressure and temperature extremes.

‘Only at ORNL’

The project highlights the diverse expertise and capabilities assembled at ORNL to address a broad range of economic, environmental and societal challenges, the scientists noted. 

“I love to talk about this project when I’m giving tours of the Aquatic Ecology Lab,” Stevenson said. “This is the type of work that can only happen at ORNL, because we have such an interdisciplinary staff here. Jun and Huimin developed a compound, brought it to us for toxicity and biodegradability testing, then we gave feedback and everyone worked iteratively to find the greenest chemical possible. 

“Green chemistry is a hot topic, and this is an example of actually doing that and working together between materials scientists and environmental scientists to get at a solution in a collaborative, productive way.”

For information on technology licensing or collaborative research, contact ORNL’s Partnerships Office. The project was funded primarily by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office, as well as DOE EERE’s Vehicle Technologies Office and the DOE and ORNL Technology Innovation programs.  

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

By: Dr. Akanksha Urade (Graphene & 2D Materials Science Writer)

Graphene is increasingly being used as an additive to transform a growing number of products in practically every industry.
In this article, I will explore the use of graphene as a lubricant.

Why Graphene?

Graphene flakes have practically endless applications. It is added to other materials to improve strength, water resistance, flexibility and electrical conductivity. A tiny amount – typically, between 0.01%-0.5% – can produce dramatic improvements.

Graphene can be an inexpensive replacement for many incumbent materials.
The problem has been finding a reliable source for industrial volumes of the right quality graphene for specific applications.

Global Lubricant Market

Grandview Research predicts that the $130 billion lubricants business in 2021 will expand at a CAGR of 3.7% through 2030, led by increasing global demand for higher-performance lubricants. Graphite is the primary incumbent material for lubricants. But graphite has a number of drawbacks – including that it only works in humid environments. Another disadvantage of graphite is the tendency of lamallae to rupture under severe mechanical loads, resulting in a limited lifetime and a higher coefficient of friction.

There are other problems with lubricants, including the use of ecologically hazardous additives or solid lubricants (such as molybdenum disulfide or boric acid). Both oil-based and solid lubricants do not bond well to the surfaces it lubricates and must be reapplied on a regular basis. Even under the best conditions, most lubricant oils eventually degrade over time due to oxidation.

Different forms of graphene have been extensively tested as a lubricant additive. Graphene’s use as a lubricant is attributed to a number of different physical-chemical properties. For example, graphene’s exceptional mechanical strength prevents material wear. Second, graphene has been demonstrated to be impermeable to liquids and gases like water and oxygen, slowing down the oxidative and corrosive processes that normally cause damage to rubbing surfaces. Furthermore, because graphene is an atomically smooth 2D material with low surface energy, it can replace the thin solid films that are typically used to reduce the adhesion and friction of various surfaces.

Graphene as an Additive in Oils

Graphene can also be utilized as an additive in lubricants to increase fuel economy and engine stability. Companies such as Graphenoil, Graphene-XT, HydroGraph, Versarien, NTherma and others have added different forms and quality of graphene to lubricating oil to enhance performance and stability, resulting in less wear and tear.

“The addition of graphene improves the oil’s tribological properties, making it more suitable for high-pressure, high-stress environments”, notes Simone Ligi, the Chief Executive Officer of Graphene-XT. “But the benefits of graphene do not stop there. Graphene has good heat transfer properties, essential to make lubricants safer at higher temperatures. All of these effects combined reduce engine noise and fuel consumption”.

Graphene as a Solid-State Lubricant

People commonly associate lubricants with the fluids found in automobiles and industrial machines. While fluids make up the vast majority of modern lubricants, a subset of lubricants known as solid-state lubricants also exists. Argonne National Lab has been researching solid lubricants based on graphene as a cheaper, more efficient and longer-lasting alternative to oil.

Image Courtesy: Berman, Diana, et al. Science (2015).

The use of graphene and carbon nanodiamonds as a solid-state lubricant to better preserve ball bearings is a field of study that has progressed rapidly in recent years, from an intriguing idea to a nearly practical reality. When graphene flakes and nanodiamond particles brush against a large diamond-like carbon (DLC) surface, the graphene encapsulates the nanodiamond by wrapping itself around it. As nanodiamonds are spherical in shape, the graphene-nanodiamond combination may travel freely between the two surfaces while providing lubrication. In addition to their lubricating and corrosion-preventative properties, they have also demonstrated super lubricity effects in which friction is reduced to nearly zero.

“That’s a significant improvement over any other existing solid lubricants coating available today,” says Argonne’s Prof. Anirudha V. Sumant. “Also, the amount of graphene needed is very small and therefore cost is much lower and eliminating oil waste would be more environmentally friendly, which is a great side benefit.”

The same research team revealed graphene to be an excellent steel lubricant. A few atomic layers of graphene not only reduce the degree of friction in steel rubbing against steel by seven times and the amount of wear by 10,000 times, but can also significantly lower the risk of corrosion.

The advantage of graphene-based solid lubricant coatings over standard lubricants is their simplicity of application. It is applied by spraying a solution over a vast surface area and can coat virtually any shape or size.

Graphene Oxide vs. Real Graphene

In our earlier piece titled “Fake Graphene: Let the Buyer Beware,” I made it abundantly clear that high-quality, defect-free graphene enjoys superior properties to their oxidized counterparts, such as graphene oxide (GO). However, in their marketing and on the labels of their bottles, many companies that sell GO and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) call these materials graphene. Even with lubricant applications, this is still the case.

Image courtesy: Berman, Diana, Materials Today (2014)

When compared to the wear rate of graphene layers, the wear rate of GO is between one and two orders of magnitude higher. As can be seen in the figure, oxidized graphene has dramatically inferior coverage compared to high-quality graphene, and the presence of oxygen in GO may cause corrosion of steel, which, in turn, increases wear. Because of this, GO does not offer anything approaching the same level of wear protection as high-quality graphene.

Conclusion

Contemporary lubricants contain ecologically hazardous chemicals or are solid lubricants (such as molybdenum disulfide or boric acid). Both oil-based and solid lubricants degrade over time and must be replenished on a regular basis. Real, high-quality graphene, on the other hand, can persist for a long period because the flakes realign themselves during initial wear cycles. Graphene, which is entirely composed of carbon, is environmentally friendly. In specific applications, do I think that graphene lubricants could serve as a suitable alternative to the more traditional oils and fluids? Yes. Would graphene lubricants be a universal replacement for oils? No. There are a number of reasons for this, but the key factor is the lack of supply of high-quality graphene. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that graphene-based lubricants and oils are making their way onto the market. However, whether or not they will come to dominate the market depends upon the ability to manufacture industrial volumes of high-quality graphene.