Sell-lubricating

As a company adapts to a service-based business model, the focus becomes solving customer s problems without selling products. Chemicals provide many services including cleaning, coating, and lubrication. What would the business model look like if only the service was provided Studies have examined this question and have concluded that the savings could be significant, up to 15 percent for the user of business model (Perthen-Palmisano and Jakl, 2004). Customers do not pay for the chemicals or the equipment, but pay for the performance of the machines. 

There are some special cases for which it is unnecessary to add a lubricant. Magnetic bearings and bearings that are suspended by a pressurized gas have no metal-to-metal contact so that wear and heat buildup are avoided. Several companies sell oil-free vacuum pumps that eliminate the trouble and expense of changing the oil, disposal costs, and contamination of process chambers, which is especially important in the manufacture of semiconductors and liquid crystal crystal displays.40 Plastic gears of nylon or polytetrafluoroethylene are self-lubricating and need no added lubricant. They reduce the noise associated with ma-... 

There are numerous suppliers of lubricants and mold release agents as a result of the variety of chemistries that perform the function of internal and external lubrication. The suppliers are generally large specialty chemical companies that sell the particular chemistry to a wide variety of end-use applications. The amount of material sold to fimc-tion as a lubricant or mold release agent for plastics is typically small in comparison to each company s total sales. Table 4.19 shows the major global suppliers of lubricants and mold release agents by type. 

Like most other preventive maintenance elements, initial guidance on lubrication should come from manufacturers. They should have extensive experience with their own equipment both in their test laboratories and in customer locations. They should know what parts wear and are frequently replaced. Therein lies a caution a manufacturer could, in fact, make short-term profits by selling large numbers of spare parts to replace worn ones. Over the long term, however, that strategy will backfire, and other vendors, whose equipment is less prone to wear and failure, will replace them. 

Initially, petroleum Is distilled into fractions up to 350 C (650 F) under atmospheric pressure into gas, naphtha, middle distillates, gas oils, and residua. The atmospheric residua can be further distilled up to 350°C under vacuum to produce vacuum gas oils, lubricant oils, and vacuum residua. A modern refinery is no longer just a big distillation column that sells various boiling fractions to different consumer markets. While distillation is usually the first step, it is important to understand that a refinery processes 100,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil a day, and must turn every barrel of that oil into something that can be sold economically in the marketplace. For this reason, many of the crude oil fractions ( streams ) undergo catalytic transformation into more valuable streams and then are blended to produce petroleum products or petrochemicals that provide the highest value to the final end use. 

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