Lube oil fractions

Lubricants. Petroleum lubricants continue to be the mainstay for automotive, industrial, and process lubricants. Synthetic oils are used extensively in industry and for jet engines they, of course, are made from hydrocarbons. Since the viscosity index (a measure of the viscosity behavior of a lubricant with change in temperature) of lube oil fractions from different cmdes may vary from +140 to as low as —300, additional refining steps are needed. To improve the viscosity index (VI), lube oil fractions are subjected to solvent extraction, solvent dewaxing, solvent deasphalting, and hydrogenation. Furthermore, automotive lube oils typically contain about 12—14% additives. These additives maybe oxidation inhibitors to prevent formation of gum and varnish, corrosion inhibitors, or detergent dispersants, and viscosity index improvers. The United States consumption of lubricants is shown in Table 7. 

Grease Manufacture Selected lube oil fractions are blended with various metallic soaps to produce high viscosit lubricating greases. 

Lube refining consists of several treating steps. Lube oil fractions as obtained from the VPS are seldom suitable as base stocks for blending branded lubricants or... 

One of the major uses of extraction is to separate petroleum products that have different chemical structures but about the same boiling range. Lube oil fractions (bp > 300°C) are treated with low-boiling polar solvents such as phenol, furfural, or methyl pyrrolidone to extract the aromatics and leave an oil that... 

The selectivity of the different zeolite systems to produce the lube oil fraction was examined in oligomerization of propene. The lube fraction of the product from oligomerizing propene with a ZSM-5 type catalyst generally has the feature of a low pour point ( —50°C) and low viscosity index (79). The lubricant-range hydrocarbons produced from the oligomerization of propene over HZSM-22 at about 240 °C had a viscosity index of 85. ... 

Wax Manufacture A waxy distillate cut from crude or the wax byproduct from lube oil dewaxing is first deoiled. Resulting low oil content wax is hydrofmed for color improvement and fractionated into appropriate melting point grades. 

Figure 3 Crude fractionation (crude distillation, three stages). An atmospheric fractionating stage produces lighter oils. An initial vacuum stage produces lube oils. A second vacuum stage fractionates bottoms from the other stages to produce asphalt and catalytic cracker feed. (From Ref. 5.)...

Lube cut a fraction of crude oil of suitable boiling range and viscosity to yield lubricating oil when completely refined also referred to as lube oil distillates or lube stock. 

ExxonMobil is now licensing this technology to other refineries. Development of similar applications in other operations is likely. Initially, applications will probably involve relatively easy separations such as the separation of methyl ethyl ketone/toluene from lube oil described above or soybean oil from hexane in food oil production. Long-term, however, the technology may become sufficiently advanced to be used in more important refining operations, such as fractionation... 

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