CHAPTER 11: The Potential of Vegetable Oils for Lubricants

Vegetable oils offer significant advantages in terms of resource renewability, bio-degradability, and comparable performance properties to petroleum-based products. Petroleum-based lubricants render an unfavorable impact on the environment. With growing environmental concerns, seed oils are finding their way into lubricants for agricultural, marine, forestry and industrial applications. Their amphiphilic character makes them excellent candidates as lubricants. The wide use of vegetable oils is restricted due to their low thermo-oxidative stability and poor cold-flow behavior. This chapter will discuss the screening of various seed oils, genetically modified oils, and chemically modified oils as basestocks for lubricant formulations; and how oxidative stability and cold-flow properties can be improved with the use of chemical additives. Important lubricant properties, such as oxidative stability, low-temperature-flow properties, friction and wear behavior, and viscosities of these oils will also be discussed. Among these oils, the best ones are high-oleic vegetable oils which, when formulated with chemical additives, provide lubricants exhibiting improved low-temperature properties, and superior oxidative stability and wear properties.