AUTOMATION IN THE LABORATORY

Abstract

THOSE who are familiar with petroleum technology will know that a great deal of laboratory bench work on products lies behind lubrication research. The lubricant that comes into the hands of the engineer for testing may have a considerable and expensive history, and the tendency for engineers to pass over detailed specifications of the lubricants they employ may indicate that they are unaware of the pre‐history of the materials they are probing. Such physical factors as viscosity, VI and flash point may be covered in the engineer's specification of what he has used, but the subtler, and sometimes significant, properties can well be overlooked. If transition phenomena are critical it could well be that chemical details of the lubricant under test are distinctly relevant. The broad influence of polar groups, or the effect of high naphthenes contents, are well‐known, but seldom does one see a “finger‐print” of a lubricant given with published data from research. Usually, the conventional data is quoted, or more exactly, copied, from the lubricant supplier's specification or “typical analysis.”

Citation

Consultant, A. (1964), "AUTOMATION IN THE LABORATORY", Industrial Lubrication and Tribology, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 14-18. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb052746