All of this reminds me of a couple of things I have
seen and heard but never been able to fully reconcile.
I wonder if you have any further "depth" on the
subject?
1. I had a discussion with an engine builder, Barry
Gerolomy, who had worked on the Infiniti Indy project
about synthetic oils. He stated that they had done
tests and found all the benefits of synthetic were
acheived at a 25% mix with common oil. He did not
specify what those benefits were exactly. He also
stated that Infiniti could have cared less about the
information, oil being a very small expense on the
project. Is there any collaboration/ hard data sources
discussing this phenomeon?
2. In a former life I worked with oil sealed pumps in
electronic processing and found huge benefits in acid
neutralization of pump oils. The oils were failing in
24 to 48 hours and needed to be replaced lest the
pumps would seize, and the pumps would corrode and
fail about monthly even with daily oil changes. We
used very large filters to remove the particulate
load, the oil did double duty as a scrubbing medium.
We coated everything we could with teflon to mitigate
the corrosion. Finally I hit upon the idea of
neutralization, not a little bit influenced by the
discussions of acids trapped in car engine oils. The
neutralization process eliminated the corrosion
problem and the pumps lived a year or more with twice
monthly oil changes. Very dramatic effects. The
neutralization process evolved into simply pouring a
slurry of Calcium Carbonate [marble dust in water,
basically a free thing] into the filter element then
letting it dry before use. This of course took years
to develop into such a simple thing but that is the
end of the tale.
So has any such work been done in the automotive
application? The sulfuric and nitric acid components
would be readily resolved into volitile cabonates as
were my hydrochloric and fluorides components I
suspect.
=====
Dennis Hale
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