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Homegrown engine oil.

Article Excerpt
Homegrown engine oil

by Lou Honary

Ag-based lubricant specialist takes on the vegetable-based engine oil challenge.

For researchers and product developers, creating biobased engine oil has been akin to the search for the Holy Grail. For the past 20 years a number of entities have been experimenting with biobased engine oil. Large groups abandoned the search after numerous trials and being faced with ever-changing specifications related to emissions control, while a small group drove a truck using biobased engine oil, licking the dipstick at various stops to make a point for the product's "environmental friendliness."In Europe, others experimented with the Continuous Oil Recycling System (CORS) concept in diesel automobiles.

While complex esters derived from vegetable oils can be stable enough to handle the engine environment, most current vegetable-oil-based technologies have lacked the necessary stability and cold temperature flowability to perform in the engines in the way petroleum engine oils do.

In 2006, after 15 years of research on industrial lubricants and greases, the University of Northern Iowa expanded the scope of the research at its National Ag-Based Lubricants Center (UNI-NABL), Waverly, IA, to include automotive oils and biofuels. The Center's researchers began to explore the concept of CORS, technology they had briefly worked with 10 years earlier with an agricultural machinery OEM.

CORS was derived from an aftermarket product that was installed on a diesel engine to continuously steal a small amount of engine oil and feed it to the fuel line. A separate reservoir was used to keep the the crankcase full of...

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