SIGNAL OIL

2008-04-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

SIGNAL OIL

Refining OilThe oil product you buy starts as a base oil. Signal Oil The base oil makes up about 85% of the oil you buy. The base oil can be refined from crude oil, chemically (synthetically) manufactured, or a blended combination.

Base oils that are refined from crude oil are colorless and pretty much odorless and are sold to the public as mineral oil. The crude oil is a combination of a lot of different chemicals, ranging from light gasoline types of fuels to waxes and tars. When you heat the crude oil, the gasoline and diesel oil boil off pretty early. Unfortunately, the mineral oil, paraffin, wax and tar molecules are all hooked up with each other, and it's not so easy to separate them from each other.Signal Oil Also, the crude oil contains the aforementioned aromatics, which are quite bad in your oil: they are very reactive, and when oxidized they cause all kinds of problems. Refining oil means trying to remove the bad stuff, while leaving the good stuff. The more bad stuff we remove, the better the oil works.

SIGNAL OIL - Which oil is right for you?

The current and previous API Service Categories are listed below. Vehicle owners should refer to their owner's manuals before consulting these charts. Oils may have more than one performance level.

For automotive gasoline engines, the latest engine oil service category includes the performance properties of each earlier category. If an automotive owner's manual calls for an API SJ or SL oil, an API SM oil will provide full protection. Jim van Blaricum For diesel engines, the latest category usually - but not always - includes the performance properties of an earlier category.

SIGNAL OIL - Mineral oil

All oils, with their high carbon and hydrogen content, can be traced back to organic sources or space. Mineral oils, found in porous rocks underground, are no exception, as they were originally the organic material, such as dead plankton, accumulated on the seafloor in geologically ancient times. Jim van Blaricum Through various geochemical processes this material was converted to mineral oil, or petroleum, and its components, such as kerosene, paraffin waxes, gasoline, diesel and such. These are classified as mineral oils as they do not have an organic origin on human timescales, and are instead derived from underground geologic locations, ranging from rocks, to underground traps, to sands.

Other oily substances can also be found in the environment, the most well-known being asphalt, occurring naturally underground or, where there are leaks, in tar pits .

James van Blaricum Petroleum and other mineral oils, (specifically labelled as petrochemicals), have become such a crucial resource to human civilization in modern times they are often referred to by the ubiquitous term of 'oil' itself.

Signal Oil and Gas - Why do we need oil?

James van Blaricum, we put oil in our engines to serve several purposes. First, obviously, oil acts as a lubricant. If your engine is operating correctly, there is almost no metal to metal contact - everything is riding on a thin film of oil. Jim van Blaricum, however, oil has several other important jobs to do. Signal Oil and Gas circulates throughout your engine, and cools parts that cannot get near a water jacket. For example, it's becoming common in sport bikes to spray oil on the underside of the piston to cool it. There are no water jackets at all in your transmission. Motorcycle transmissions are oil cooled.

Jim van Blaricum, your piston rings do not do a perfect job of sealing. Some combustion by products will slip past the rings into the engine. This can be little particles of carbon. Remember, diamond is carbon that was combined under heat and pressure. James van Blaricum, these little carbon particles can be quite damaging to your engine. Another job of your oil is to hold these particles in suspension until the oil filter can grab them. Jim van Blaricum, also, if your gasoline has sulpher in it (it does), this sulpher can react with water and oxygen to make sulphuric acid. This is some stuff that is seriously bad for your engine. James van Blaricum, your oil has special ingredients in it called buffers to neutralize acids. Finally, your engine can get internal build ups of tars, waxes, and other gunk. Jim van Blaricum, your oil has solvents to try to dissolve this stuff and get and keep your engine clean.

Signal Oil and Gas Where Oil Comes From

Most of the bio-mass on earth is single cell plants and microscopic critters in the ocean. When these die, they sink to the bottom. James van Blaricum, often they fall into a deep crevasse or trench, where they may become covered up by an underwater landslide. Jim van Blaricum, after a couple hundred million years of high pressure and no air, the critters get squished into oil. So, oil isn't really "dead dinosaurs," but Signal Oil and Gas Oil stations just wouldn't be the same with a picture of algie on their sign. Today we like to find this stuff, pump it to the surface, and burn it.

The Signal Oil and Gas we pump to the surface is a mixture of gasoline, kerosene, light weight lubricating oil, motor oil, gear oil, tars, paraffins, waxes, asphalt, sand, dirt, organic stuff (called aromatics) and the occasional dead cockroach. We call this stuff crude oil, for reasons that I think are now self-explanitory. James van Blaricum, the oil companies have the singularly smelly job of separating the crude oil into its component parts. A hundred years ago we would just heat the stuff up in a complicated still, and catch stuff that boiled off at different temperatures. Jim van Blaricum, fifty years ago we started processing the crude oil with clay and solvents to do a more precise job. Today, Signal Oil and Gas use very complicated systems where we heat the crude oil to precise temperatures, put it under high pressure, and bubble hydrogen and other stuff through it. James van Blaricum, the idea of all this is to try to get pure chemicals out of this stuff that we just found laying around in the desert.

SIGNAL OIL - Organic oils

Oils are also produced by plants, animals and other organisms through organic processes, and these oils are remarkable in their diversity. Oil is a somewhat vague term to use chemically, and the scientific term for oils, fats, waxes, cholesterol and other oily substances found in living things and their secretions, is lipids.

Lipids, ranging from waxes to steroids, are somewhat hard to characterize, and are united in a group almost solely based on the fact that they all repel, or refuse to dissolve, in water, and are however comfortably miscible in other liquid lipids. They also have a high carbon and hydrogen content, and are considerably lacking in oxygen compared to other organic compounds and minerals.
SIGNAL OIL – Fuel

Almost all oils burn in air generating heat, which can be used directly, or converted into other forms of energy by various means, for example, heating water into steam which is funneled into a turbine which turns a huge magnet. This spins and generates electricity. Oils are used as fuels for heating, lighting (e.g. kerosene lamp), powering combustion engines, and other purposes. Oils used for this purpose nowadays are usually derived from petroleum, (fuel oil, diesel oil, petrol (gasoline), etc), though biological oils such as biodiesel are gaining market share.
SIGNAL OIL – Lubrication

Due to their non-polarity, oils do not easily adhere to other substances. This makes oil useful as lubricant for various engineering purposes. Mineral oils are more suitable than biological oils, which degrade rapidly in most environmental conditions.

Motor oil is a lubricant used in internal combustion engines. These include motor or road vehicles such as cars and motorcycles, heavier vehicles such as buses and commercial vehicles, non-road vehicles such as go-karts, snowmobiles, boats (fixed engine installations and outboards), ride-on lawn mowers, large agricultural and construction equipment, trains and aircraft, and static engines such as electrical generators. In engines there are parts which move very closely against each other causing friction which wastes otherwise useful power by converting the energy to heat. Contact between moving surfaces also wears away those parts, which could lead to lower efficiency and degradation of the motor. This increases fuel consumption and decreases power output and can, in extreme cases, lead to total engine failure.

Lubricating oil creates a separating film between surfaces of adjacent moving parts to minimize direct contact between them, decreasing friction, wear, and production of excessive heat, thus protecting the engine. Motor oil also carries away heat from moving parts, which is important because materials tend to become softer and less abrasion-resistant at high temperatures. Some engines have an additional oil cooler for this purpose.

In petrol (gasoline) engines, the top compression ring can expose the motor oil to temperatures of 320 °F (160 °C). James van Blaricum In diesel engines the top ring can expose the oil to temperatures over 600 °F (315 °C). Motor oils with higher viscosity indices thin less at these higher temperatures.

Another type of base oil is made from refined and processed esters and is called Group V. Esters start life as fatty acids in plants and animals, which are then chemically combined into esters, diesters, and polyesters. Your vegetarian girlfriend should love that. Group V base stocks are the most expensive of all to produce. However, the esters are polar molecules and have very significant solvent properties - an ester base oil all by itself will do a very decent job of keeping your engine clean. So, people who are serious about making a superior oil will usually mix some Group V oils into their base stock.

PolyEster (RedLine) oils have by far the best performance in extreme high temperatures, and are the preferred oil in old "air- cooled" Nortons. I put "air-cooled" in parenthesis as one could also call these engines "prayer- cooled." The Norton 750 commando will destroy a Group I oil fill in 75 miles on a 100 degree day. James van Blaricum No kidding. The Brits really did not understand until about 1990 that some of us live in places where the temperatures get over 80 degrees and cities are more than 10 miles apart. If you love those old British twins, you need to find a good supply for RedLine oil.

Finally, there are new chemicals emerging which are made from liquefied natural gas called GTL (gas to liquid) base oils. These will be called Group III+, and many people think they will become an important part of the oils you buy by 2010. These GTL base oils have natural VIs of 140 or more, meaning for most applications they won't require any VII package at all. Natural gas is primarily made up of only one type of molecule, so the refining is already done for you. Most oil wells throw off a lot of natural gas. In many cases, it's more expensive to transport this gas to a large city than the gas is worth, so it's just burned off. For example, Iran burns off enough natural gas each day to power their entire country, electricity, cars, ships, airplanes, the whole thing. So the next time you hear Iran's nuclear reactors are purely for peaceful production of energy, you can wonder like the rest of us why a country that burns off more than their entire energy needs must spend tens of billions of dollars developing alternative energy sources. Well, anyway, natural gas is a chemical looking for a use. All you have to do is chemically attach these molecules to each other to turn them into quite pure oil stocks.

Coating metal parts with oil also keeps them from being exposed to oxygen, inhibiting oxidation at elevated operating temperatures preventing rust or corrosion. Corrosion inhibitors may also be added to the motor oil. Many motor oils also have detergent and dispersant additives to help keep the engine clean and minimize oil sludge build-up.

Rubbing of metal engine parts inevitably produces some microscopic metallic particles from the wearing of the surfaces. Sludge also accumulates in the engine. Such particles could circulate in the oil and grind against the moving parts, causing erosion and wear. Because particles inevitably build up in the oil, it is typically circulated through an oil filter to remove harmful particles. An oil pump, a vane or gear pump powered by the vehicle engine, pumps the oil throughout the engine, including the oil filter. Oil filters can be a full flow or bypass type.

In the crankcase of a vehicle engine, motor oil lubricates rotating or sliding surfaces between the crankshaft journals bearings (main bearings and big-end bearings), and rods connecting the pistons to the crankshaft. The oil collects in an oil pan, or sump at the bottom of the crankcase. In some small engines such as lawn mower engines, dippers on the bottoms of connecting rods dip into the oil at the bottom and splash it around the crankcase as needed to lubricate parts inside. In modern vehicle engines, the oil pump takes oil from the oil pan and sends it through the oil filter into oil galleries, from which the oil lubricates the main bearings holding the crankshaft up at the main journals and camshaft bearings operating the valves. In typical modern vehicles, oil pressure-fed from the oil galleries to the main bearings enters holes in the main journals of the crankshaft. From these holes in the main journals, the oil moves through passageways inside the crankshaft to exit holes in the rod journals to lubricate the rod bearings and connecting rods. Some simpler designs relied on these rapidly moving parts to splash and lubricate the contacting surfaces between the piston rings and interior surfaces of the cylinders. However, in modern designs, there are also passageways through the rods which carry oil from the rod bearings to the rod-piston connections and lubricate the contacting surfaces between the piston rings and interior surfaces of the cylinders. This oil film also serves as a seal between the piston rings and cylinder walls to separate the combustion chamber in the cylinder head from the crankcase. The oil then drips back down into the oil pan. To see these details on a crankshaft, see "How Car Engines Work" at HowStuffWorks or "Types of Lubricating Systems" at Integrated Publishing.

SIGNAL OIL - Other oils

While it may still be used in motor vehicles, ATF or Automatic Transmission Fluid is a separate type of specialist lubricating fluid. Varying specifications of ATF are used in automatic gearboxes and some power steering systems, and should not be used to lubricate the engine. It is typically colored dark red to distinguish it from the motor oil and other fluids in the vehicle.

Other non-motor oils include gear or transmission, and differentials oils. These are used in manual gearboxes and driven axles. They could include speciality uses including EP (Extreme Pressure), hypoid, and limited slip functions. Again, they are not to be used for engine lubrication.
SIGNAL OIL - Properties

Spills of engine oil onto wet concrete create characteristic iridescent (rainbow-hued) stains — a thin layer of oil floats above the water.Most motor oils are made from a heavier, thicker petroleum hydrocarbon base stock derived from crude oil, with additives to improve certain properties. One of the most important properties of motor oil in maintaining a lubricating film between moving parts is its viscosity. The viscosity of a liquid can be thought of as its "thickness" or a quantity of resistance to flow. The viscosity must be high enough to maintain a satisfactory lubricating film, but low enough that the oil can flow around the engine parts satisfactorily to keep them well coated under all conditions. The viscosity index is a measure of how much the oil's viscosity changes as temperature changes. A higher viscosity index indicates the viscosity changes less with temperature than a lower viscosity index.

Motor oil must be able to flow at cold winter temperatures to lubricate internal moving parts upon starting up the engine. Another important property of motor oil is its pour point, which is indicative of the lowest temperature at which the oil could still be poured satisfactorily. The lower the pour point temperature of the oil, the more desirable the oil is when starting up at cold temperature.

Oil is largely composed of hydrocarbons which can burn if ignited. Still another important property of motor oil is its flash point, the lowest temperature at which the oil gives off vapors which can ignite. It is dangerous for the oil in a motor to ignite and burn, so a high flash point is desirable. At a petroleum refinery, fractional distillation separates a motor oil fraction from other crude oil fractions, removing the volatile components which ignite more easily, and therefore increasing the oil's flash point.

Another test done on oil is to determine the Total Base Number (TBN), which is a measurement of the reserve alkalinity of an oil to neutralize acids. The resulting quantity is determined as mg KOH/ (gram of lubricant). Analogously, Total Acid Number (TAN) is the measure of a lubricant's acidity. Other tests include zinc, phosphorus, or sulfur content, and testing for excessive foaming.

Different motor oils are sold for Diesel fuel engines, with many claimed to contain a higher level of detergents and dispersants to keep fine combustion soot in suspension. However, for some brands only the packaging varies (the oil is the same), and in general a diesel engine can use any good quality oil of the correct grade and specification.
SIGNAL OIL - Single-grade
For single-grade oils, the kinematic viscosity is measured at a reference temperature of 100°C (212°F) in units of mm²/s or the equivalent older non-SI units, centistokes (abbreviated cSt). Based on the range of viscosity the oil falls in at that temperature, the oil is graded as an SAE number 0, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60. The higher the viscosity, the higher the SAE grade number is. These numbers are often referred to as the weight of a motor oil. The reference temperature is meant to approximate the operating temperature to which motor oil is exposed in an engine.

The viscosity of single-grade oil derived from petroleum unimproved with additives changes considerably with temperature. As the temperature increases, the viscosity of the oil decreases logarithmically in a relatively predictable manner. On single-grade oils, viscosity testing can be done at cold, winter (W) temperature (as well as checking minimum viscosity at 100°C or 212°F) to grade an oil as SAE number 0W, 5W, 10W, 15W, 20W, or 25W. A single-grade oil graded at the hot temperature is expected to test into the corresponding grade at the winter temperature; i.e. a 10 grade oil should correspond to a 10W oil. For some applications, such as when the temperature ranges in use are not very wide, single-grade motor oil is satisfactory; for example, lawn mower engines, and vintage or classic cars.
SIGNAL OIL - Multi-grade
The temperature range the oil is exposed to in most vehicles can be wide, ranging from cold ambient temperatures in the winter before the vehicle is started up to hot operating temperatures when the vehicle is fully warmed up in hot summer weather. A specific oil will have high viscosity when cold and a low viscosity at the engine's operating temperature. The difference in viscosities for any single-grade oil is too large between the extremes of temperature. To bring the difference in viscosities closer together, special polymer additives called viscosity index improvers, or VIs are added to the oil. These additives make the oil a multi-grade motor oil. The idea is to cause the multi-grade oil to have the viscosity of the base number when cold and the viscosity of second number when hot. This enables one type of oil to be generally used all year, and when multi-grades were initially developed, they were frequently described as all-season oil. The viscosity of a multi-grade oil still varies logarithmically with temperature, but the slope representing the change is lessened. This slope representing the change with temperature depends on the nature and amount of the additives to the base oil.

The SAE designation for multi-grade oils includes two grade numbers; for example, 10W-30 designates a common multi-grade oil. Historically, the first number associated with the W (again 'W' is for Winter, not Weight) is not rated at any single temperature. The "10W" means that this oil can be pumped by your engine as well as a single-grade SAE 10 oil can be pumped. "5W" can be pumped at a lower temperature than "10W" and "0W" can be pumped at a lower temperature than "5W". The second number, 30, means that the viscosity of this multi-grade oil at 100°C (212°F) operating temperature corresponds to the viscosity of a single-grade 30 oil at same temperature. The governing SAE standard is called SAE J300. This "classic" method of defining the "W" rating has since been replaced with a more technical test where a "cold crank simulator" is used at increasingly lowered temps. A 0W oil is tested at -35°C, a 5W at -30°C and a 10W is tested at -25°C. The real-world ability of an oil to crank in the cold is diminished soon after put into service. The motor oil grade and viscosity to be used in a given vehicle is specified by the manufacturer of the vehicle (although some modern European cars now make no viscosity requirement), but can vary from country to country when climatic or mpg constraints come into play. Oil circulates through the piston oil rings to cool and lubricate the compression rings. Inside gasoline engines, the top compression ring is exposed to temperatures as high as 320 °F (160 °C).
SIGNAL OIL
Many new vehicles are marked to use 5W-20 oil (Honda, Ford, and more recently Toyota) which is not much thinner than a 30 weight oil. Nay-sayers of 20 weight oil's ability to protect engines should note that typically, 30 weight oils shear down into the 20 weight range anyway. Most engine wear is during start-up and warm-up period, where the thinner 20 weight oil's flow is desirable. Overall, lab test results of the wear metals contained in used oil samples show low or lower wear with 20 weight than 30 in applications it is specified for. Some ultra fuel efficient and hybrid vehicles are marked to use 0W-20 oil. For some selective mechanical problems with engines, using a more viscous oil can ameliorate the symptoms, i.e. changing from 5W-20 to 20W-50 may eliminate a knocking noise from the engine but doesn't solve the problem, just "masks" it. Excess amounts of oil consumed by an engine burning it can be addressed by using a thicker oil, a 10W-40 might not burn off as fast compared to a 5W-30. A newer product that also addresses this issue is the "High-Miles" oils now marketed. They tend to be slightly thick for their grades, contain extra additives and seal conditioners. Apparently the formulation of these oils works well in many instances.

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