Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: G'day everyone. Welcome to lubrication experts. And today we've got a very special episode on Greece with Jacob Bonter. He's from valvoline global operations, I guess, as they're now known. And so now he does have an extremely long kind of title, so maybe I'll let him explain it. Jacob, welcome to the podcast. And what do you do with Aveline?
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Thanks very much. I'm very happy to be here.
As of today, I am the lead formulation scientist for industrial fluids and greases in the Americas.
So it is a mouth. It's hard to fit on a business card.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I can imagine. So number one, congratulations. I gather that's a slightly newer job title, although you've been doing the grease thing for quite a while, but also that makes you very well placed to talk to the topic today. So what I thought we'd do today is something maybe a little bit different. Rather than focusing on a particular physical property or specific type of lubricant, we will talk through kind of grease development. You know, take it through its not necessarily its life cycle, but from beginning to end of conception.
How do you sort of test these products, and then how does something like that get out into the marketplace? Because obviously these ideas have to originate from somewhere, and usually they originate from the mind of someone like Jacob. So anyway, I think that would be an interesting exercise, if you wouldnt mind helping us.
Right at the very beginning, were trying to conceive of an idea. We want to put a new product into the market.
I guess. Number one, what are the kinds of things that youre targeting? Is it a specific application? Is it a specific environment?
Maybe its an industry.
What are the things that were thinking about first up when were going for a new product?
[00:01:53] Speaker B: It can be a bit of all of those things. In reality, greases tend to be application specific, maybe more so than a lot of the other lubricants that are out there. So you may take into account what type of equipment are you going to apply this product to? What kind of environment is it going to be in? Do you need this lubricant to be safe, suitable for all the equipment on a construction site, or is this going to work on one very specialized type of machine? So factors like that matter a lot, especially in the initial conceptualization of what that product is going to look like, where it's going to go, and ultimately, how is it going to perform in the field.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Yeah, right. So let's say, for example, I guess there's kind of two ways that you can conceive of the product. One would be kind of like push and the other one being pulled. So one would be maybe that there seems to be demand for a product that maybe doesn't exist full stop or doesn't exist within your own product line. And then the other one would be, hey, I think that there should be a need for a specific kind of product.
Let's go ahead and develop those specs.
In your experience, like, what are the drivers between each of those? And maybe like, how frequently do you see each of them?
[00:03:17] Speaker B: I would say maybe equal amounts for both.
The pool concept comes in frequently. We see new machinery coming online all the time. More strenuous performance requirements, more demanding applications. The concept of power density going up and up and up. How much more power can we get out of a smaller piece of equipment? That's a constant and ever evolving development in Loom's industry, grease industry specifically. So as far as pool goes, very common. We have a equipment supplier.
They're developing a new type of machinery. They want to have a grease that meets a certain warranty requirement or that they know is going to operate in a certain condition. So many times we'll have the OEM or the end user come to us and say, we need something that does this, and then we will essentially try to design to suit that. And we always have to keep in mind the main drivers. Are we able to make this?
Is there enough volume in this segment for us to build something specialized? Or should we try to tune something that's existing to fit? And then three is the cost. Can we make a grease? Is almost always yes. Can the grease be economical enough to be used in that application or by those end users? That's really the hard part. A lot of times on the push side, I'll say that because of the unique properties of grease, we can do a lot of creative work with the material. You think about fluid lubricants, you're sort of limited in some ways and what materials you can design with. But greases are very unique. So we find that the innovation space is very ripe. And we've been able to develop new types of technologies, take new approaches to thickeners, take new approaches to additive systems, be very creative of materials. And so often we'll say we've developed a great product that is suitable for this heavy duty space. And we think the cost profile is great, the environmental profile is maybe improved, and performance is meets or exceeds what's in the market, then we will take that sort of technology to someone and push that forward. So, to circle back. Really, it's, I would say, equal parts of both.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really interesting because obviously two different, uh, completely different approaches. I mean, one thing just to pick up on, when you said, like, what is economic for the customer, um, you know, I find maybe even more so with Greece, that the variation in what is economic is just gigantic.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: It is.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: I need every tube to be less than a dollar because, you know, this is effectively a total loss operation right through to know, $30,000 a kilo style, PTFE, PFP type, type greases that are used in the space industry. And hey, we can justify the cost because we're only using like a single drop in a bearing.
Why is there such massive variation?
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Well, that's a great question. It comes down to a lot of factors. One is the sort of, and maybe this is a kind of a crude way to put it, but there's the historical pump and dump user. If I put grease in it, that's all that it needs. And so as long as there's grease in it, it's going to work the way it needs to work. So that grease needs to be as cheap as it can physically be. It doesn't matter how good it is. I just need something to put in there because I'm going to put it back in tomorrow and then I'm going to put it in the next day. And so a lot of those users cost is the penultimate arbiter on the product. It doesn't matter what it does. It just has to go in there and needs to be the right cost profile. We find a lot of work in the middle where you have expensive assets, you know, excavators, bulldozers, heavy machinery, even things like conveyors, things like rock crushers, and in the industry, electric motors, things like mill components. The list is just massive. Of grease lubricated applications.
It is massive. But in those, those applications, it's, it's a balance. They need a product that keeps the component working longer because uptime is profit. Uptime is functionality for an end user. But at the same time, they're usually a large volume user of this product. And so if you come in with the grease that meets their requirements, that's, we'll say $3 a pound, and then you can also make one that's dollar, two a pound that has most of their requirements. You know, there's a balancing act, and it's somewhat from the end user and then from, we'll say from their accounting division, there's a lot of gray area balance with grease work. And I think that in part is why you see, especially today, more and more the marketers and manufacturers moving towards a, I'll say a portfolio of products, but a little bit more of a multi purpose product portfolio where they can have sort of a good, better, best tiered product approach that covers most of the segment without diving too deep into the highly niche, highly specialty stuff. But that segment is there. Think of things like wind turbines, extremely expensive asset that grease is a critical lubrication component of that system. And so in those cases, uptime and maintenance costs are very high. So if you can improve the product 50% with 10% more cost, and they're usually a lot more accepting of that.
In my experience, we tend to try to look at a total cost of ownership sort of approach with a end customer. If it's a component that's replaced on a regular maintenance schedule, regardless, the cost effective product might be better, or if it's a piece of equipment where downtime is the biggest driver of its financial impact, then they usually are more open to a more premium product. So again, it's a broad spectrum, a little bit of everything in there.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I find it interesting that you brought up, you know, things like excavators and crushes and things like that. Only because, you know, here in Australia, mining industry is obviously really big. They tend to over index on, let's say, you know, use of grease. And in a lot of cases, you know, they, the grease is, let's say, for example, when it comes to grease calculations and how much grease I'm supposed to be using, you know, for them, uh, they're often kind of taking those calculations and then using way more grease because the grease is being more or less used as a flushing medium. Right. We're trying to get the contaminants out of the bearing as opposed to we need fresh grease in the bearing, you know, for um, for grease ages sake or replenishment. Um, so, yeah, and then I obviously that makes them overindex on cost as well.
So it is interesting to see how it sort of plays into different industries. All right, so we've got our kind of like idea of push versus pull. So now we go into, I guess like the original concept and trying to develop what does this product look like? I always look at greases being basically just three different ingredients. You've got your thickener, your base oil and your additives.
I guess we could probably talk about solid additives being separate to the standard ones. So what are the kind of conversations that you might have internally about how are we pulling on each of those levers or making decisions to come up with the initial concept?
[00:10:47] Speaker B: Right. So if you kind of think about that core system, you break it into those, we'll say those three buckets. That's a good course overview. The first thing, and maybe the primary thing, is the thickener. Right? What sort of structure is suitable for your application? One is it always comes back to price again. And so if you're a company that makes only lithium grease, then you're going to be highly likely to lean towards doing a lithium product. But if you have all of the tools in the toolbox, then you may say, you know, what is my application? What sort of structures are out there? What kind of properties do they bring me to, and how does that make my total products performance profile? Look, if we lean back into this construction type of application again, you think a heavily loaded environment, likely a dirty environment, likely sees a lot of wet conditions because you're working, you know, in the exposed, you could be working near brackish or seawater. So environmental conditions are severe, loading regimes are severe, wear rates can be very high. And so if you consider that that's the basis application that you're looking at, and you go to look at the thickeners toolbox, you could look at, say, lithium systems or lithium complex, good all round performance, good structural stability, but they don't bring a lot in the way of inherent properties. So while they give good high temperature protection, good structural stability, they don't do much in the way of corrosion protection. They don't have a lot of tribological activity. And so then you may consider it, comparing to the system, something that has some of these properties baked in. So you may consider an anhydrous calcium grease or even a calcium sulfonate grease. These materials tend to have excellent built in water resistance properties. They tend to have good corrosion resistance properties. And then, as you think about the rest of the system, while this calcium sulfonate thickener is more expensive, say, than some of the others we discussed, the properties that it brings from its inherent structure reduce your amount of additives that.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: You have to use.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: So for me to make that lithium grease a good corrosion protection, good tribological protection, I'm going to have to use a healthy amount of performance additives to get that performance up to that line. It's not impossible to do, but there's costs that's associated with that. Whereas with that calcium sulfonate system, good tribological activity is built in, good corrosion protection is built in. So you might not have to use nearly as much.
In Greece's, the oil section is maybe the one of the biggest cost drivers because it's the, it's usually the largest majority of the product. And so if you have a system that is not seeing extreme swings of heat and maybe has a frequent service interval, you would consider lower cost mineral oils, maybe some nap thinning oils, or some group one and two blends with these types of materials because they're cost effective. And if the lifetime of the product isn't very long, you could use those. But if you think about a longer fill time or something that's working in more extreme heat or more serious environmental conditions than some of the synthetics or blends or exotic oils, all of these things that start to come into play at that point. So really it's, what is the target application? What is the cost profile for that application? And then what, what are the tools in the toolbox that I can use to build the thing that's the best for that application? So just to kind of go back through it, starting with the structure, what's the best for this application? Look at the fluid component, the oils. This is my cost driver in a lot of cases. What can the system tolerate and still function well? And then finally, additives. What extra, what extra special sauce do we have to put in here to get it to the point where it performs, where it needs to be in the application?
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting. All right, so I think there might be an interesting side discussion here that we had on how Greece as kind of like a technology platform, is a little bit different from like, lubricants.
Because I think you get, in some ways, a lot more variation in what you can put together on the, on the technical and the sales side of things. I think the way that we experience this is, is often that it's very difficult to, like, cross over from one, uh, you know, set of greases to another, because unlike with most lubricants, where you pretty much just having to match kind of like the base oil and is it miscible and, you know, maybe a little bit of the, the additive chemistry, like, like we said, there is so much more to it because you're also having to take into account the thickener chemistry, et cetera. So, can you talk a little bit to the advantages, I guess, of Greece as kind of a technology platform?
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the, it's my favorite material to work in. I've been doing formulations work in industry for about eleven years, and I've done coatings and adhesives I've done cleaning products, I've done a little bit of everything. But grease is absolutely the most interesting, the most diverse product line to work in that I've been in. So I'm a big proponent.
If you make a quick example of engine oils.
When you formulate an engine oil, you tend to only have so many levers in the system that you can pull. You can work with viscosity a little bit, but not much because it's usually set by the manufacturer. You can work with the additive chemistry some, but not much, because if you move too much, you get outside of your certification for your GF six or your whatever your other classifications that you hold are, there's sort of a chemical window, and so the formulation space is vital, but it's a little small. You know, you can only do so much and still consider yourself a certified usable product. But Greece is not that way. Greece is very performance driven. So if you look at some of the specifications that are out there, like the NLGI, GCLB, and the new HPM specification and enhanced categories, while they're robust, they are only performance metrics. They're chemistry agnostic. And so because of that, it doesn't matter how you get there, as long as you get there with grease. And the thing that makes it so flexible is that unlike the fluid lubricants, where everything is in a single phase, right, everything is a liquid, greases are two phase system. You have the liquid lubricating phase and the solid structural phase. And because it's the two phase, semi solid system, you can get really creative of what you put in there.
As an example, you could have additives that in an engine oil aren't soluble, or maybe they have very small amount of solubility, so you can only use the tiniest little bit. But in a grease, because you have a solid structure system, even if your additive isn't 100% soluble in your oil, you can still disperse it in the grease, so that in the actual application, that additive can be very active in the system. Also, because grease is this multi phase, multi component system, you can be very creative with the types of materials that you can use.
Personally, we have found things from all sorts of other industries not related to lubricants that you can make great use of in a grease because of this two phase solid liquid system. So you can disperse lots of different types of solids. You can. You can disperse immiscible liquids, so you could have a liquid that won't dissolve with this liquid, but because you have this structure that can hold them together, then you can actually put them together and then they can do interesting chemistry in the application. So as a technology platform, it's wildly flexible and gives you so many things to work with. And again, this kind of circles back to my previous comment.
The system itself is very ripe for innovation because there's not really a box. It's really whatever you can figure out to make it meet the performance requirements of a system.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: Right. Thats a really interesting perspective and I think that ties in nicely to the next step. I think of the evolution of a product which when youre saying its so performance driven. So how do you define the performance criteria for a specific risk? Because I think lets say on the datasheet most of the time, what were saying are industry standardized bench tests, but are there outside performance criteria that maybe you're trying to hit?
Whether maybe you mentioned the NLGI grease specs for example. That could be something. It could be like an OEM spec, it could even be, hey, we would like it to achieve our own internal specification in terms of performance. So what are the kinds of things that we're trying to hit as we, as we shape this product?
[00:19:41] Speaker B: That's a great question.
The approach is different depending on the product and the application. If it's new to the world, you're going to look at what you can do in the laboratory. You may reference things like the NLGI specifications. Again, our hypothetical construction application. We may want something that meets, say, that HPM core plus high load specification because it's a good basis, state of performance criteria that we know is applicable to that field. However, just like with many things, the laboratory can tell you a lot, but it can't always tell you everything. So if you're building something new for the end user, you may build it in the laboratory, do the bench testing, say it looks good compared to performance specification, but then ultimately you'll do field trials. Field trials tend to be our ultimate arbiter when it comes to a new to the world product. But the other case is also true where you could say you have this construction company and they're using a product, you can build your product to, say, meet a known performance criteria for something that's out there. Or even if you're redesigning your own material and you have a lot of historical information that this viscosity, this sort of additive chemistry, this thickener system worked well. So we know if we can make our laboratory performance data look comparable to that product's laboratory performance data, the chances are pretty positive that when it goes into the field, that it'll have more inline performance results than you would if you didn't have that sort of information to compare to. And I'll say that's a very common approach for us and for many manufacturers, is we, we tend to be an iterative type of approach, and so we know what works and if we can make, make it a little bit better in the laboratory, improve the cost profile, maybe improve the materials a little bit, that makes the iterative process a little simpler, because you can kind of work from known space.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So it's a combination of like innovation, but also iteration as well, which, well.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: And also just as kind of stick to this for a moment. Customers tend to be cautious about making change if it's too dramatic. Even things as simple, as irrelevant as it can be, as color can be, you know, a big driver for them. If you're, if you've been using a blue grease for ten years and now you're proposing a green grease or a red grease, you know, they may not know that that's, they can be cautious about that. They even, you know, properties like adhesiveness or tack, you'll have, you'll have the operator doing the thumb and finger test. They will, they feel a little different. The way that they look in the cartridge, the way they look when they pump out of the gun. And even outside of these, these sorts of things, you could come to me and say, this is my application and I would like to have a product that meets this product that I have here, but my recommendation might be to, you should reduce the base oil viscosity. I think you'll have lower bearing temperatures and longer component life, but there could be resistance to that because they, they have used the higher viscosity for a long time. And so the sort of the, well say the baked in tribal knowledge around grease products is sometimes a barrier you have to work around when it comes to innovation as well.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: Nate? Yeah, that is really interesting. And I feel like Greece is one of those areas where theres so many, even more myths than there are with liquid lubricating oils.
Yeah, you make a really good point. I even see companies, lets say for example, developing multipurpose greases, which are used in the same applications as what you would typically see, the ISO 220 standard multipurpose, often an NLGI two. ISO 220 would be your general multipurpose grease. And you see a lot of companies going for an NLGI two, but ISO 1500 and each to their own, that's kind of uh, I see that more as almost being like sales and marketing driven necessarily, than performance driven. Because you can go out there and say, hey, look how much more load carrying capacity I'm going to have because, you know, more, more viscosity means better. Right. And uh, you know, obviously that's not necessarily true, but, but that is an approach that you, you can take.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Well, it's a, it's a very, it's a very fair point. And it's something that is, I'll say, prolific. And the grease industry especially, who has the biggest four ball ep number, who has the biggest viscosity values?
That conversation goes on to everything that shows up on a data sheet. And what's the actual relevance to an application? It can be very difficult to say.
I find that a lot of my job is to try to educate customers and end users and even people that do sales and marketing on what are the actual factors that matter in a lubricating grease? What are these data from the lab that matter? Is it having the bigger than 800 kilogram weld load? Does that matter in some applications? Maybe in many. It doesn't mean much at all. And so it is a complicated product and it's a complicated industry because we don't have five w 25, W 30, ten w 46 or eight products. And there it is.
Even the leanest grease product line will be 30 or 40 products. And sometimes if you look at some companies, there's hundreds and hundreds of grease products out there because they tend to be very application specific, kind of like I mentioned before. So it is also just trying to educate the industry that biggest numbers don't always mean that it's better. It's having the right numbers for the right application.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Yeah, interesting. Now speaking of which, at some point in this process, you got to start making up samples and doing bench tests. I know we said that field testing is the ultimate proving ground, but presumably were doing some quick and dirty bench tests first and theres probably some standardized bench testing that were doing as well. Now my understanding is not having actually done it myself, but making grease at a bench scale versus manufacturing Greece is a very different proposition. So there is an aspect of scaling up which we can probably talk to a little bit later. So at this stage, were just making very, very small volumes, maybe in a pail or something like that, and were taking that stuff and were applying some bench tests. So how are we doing that? And then how are we selecting the bench tests that we think are going to be relevant for, for our criteria?
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. There's a lot of we'll say different philosophies out there on how you do this. Most folks put together what we, what we call a base grease. So it's essentially thickener and oil and no additives. And oftentimes what we will do is we'll make that base grease very concentrated, so it'd be very firm NLGi, four or even five grade. The reason that we'll do that is that allows us the ability to dilute it with different oils. So if I want to make the ISO 220 version, I can use this. If I want to make the 320, we do that. But I only had to make that sort of base profile one time, so it simplifies that. So a lot of, a lot of early thought will go into your sort of base starting material. So it gives you the most flexibility to iterate off of. You don't have to go make a new one every day.
And, you know, most folks will make base grease. You could make pale quantity, but usually you won't start with a pail. You'll usually start with about two or three pounds. And people will do these in little tiny reactors. They'll do them in kitchenaid mixers. All kinds of fun little lab rigs are out there for doing small scale resenthesis. But you'll, you'll make that two or three pounds of this kind of concentrated base, you know, mixture. And then from there you'll say, what are my applications? Let's make up a few, a few spinoffs of this grease. You'll make three or 400 grams with the oil diluent that you want. Make sure your penetration grade is where you want it. And then you start with the core items. What can you check before you add additives? So we'll do things like make sure dropping point is where it needs to be. That's an easy test. Takes very little bit of material, very simple to do. We'll do things like I mentioned, foam penetration is the consistency where it needs to be, some of the basic structural evaluations. So is my core thickener oil combination structurally stable? Is it going to fall apart? Does it bleed too much? Does it not bleed enough? Start there, because then if your foundation is sound and you have the basic structure oil relationship where you're at, then you have a good place to start from. From there. If, again, we look at our hypothetical construction application, the tribological properties in those applications are critical. And tribological tests, especially some of the simpler tests, tend to be low in cost, relatively quick and easy to screen materials with. So we may say we're looking for this HPM core plus high load, and we have some experience in making products. So I would make a selection of a couple of performance additives. Start with a, say, maybe a relatively high treat rate of each, and then we'll send it down to the tribology lab, and we would run, say, d 2596 four ball EP, d 2266 four ball wear, and then usually D 5706, the SRV EP test. And that gives us a pretty broad snapshot of the tribological behavior of the product. If the data comes back and it's really strong, then we can iterate by reducing the concentrations of those. If we come back and it's weak, we may change gears, use a different material, change our concentrations around, maybe play with that base oil viscosity. My personal approach is to, to start with a good foundation, but then do minimal testing. Start with the most important factors. Test those. If those don't work, then you didn't check everything in the lab. You only check two or three things. You can throw that one away and start over, but if those work out, then you can start to branch out to the other performance factors that are critical. And usually you start from the quickest test and move to the very long test towards the end. So if you're going to, say, check corrosion properties, you might start off with the standard bearing corrosion test. It takes two days, 48 hours. If that looks good, maybe you evolved to the m core corrosion test, which takes a week, but you don't want to jump and pull the trigger on all of these. And then there's a critical flaw in your product philosophy somewhere, and you have to toss all the data and start over. That's usually would be my approach to bullying.
[00:30:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting. All right, so that gives us a good picture for some of those decision points that have to happen. And I think that approach of what tests that we're going to do, which are relevant for the application, makes a ton of sense.
And I'm assuming that most of the time, there is a bit of iteration on that. So you've got your base product, you're starting to develop it, you see some good data come in, and like you said, maybe you make adjustments to that, to that product on the fly based on some of the information that you get back from those tests. At some point, though, we feel like we've got the product or the formulation pretty much nailed.
All the performance criteria are starting to look pretty good, especially on the bench scale. And like you said, now I guess the next step is putting it into use in terms of a field trial.
Number one, I think, which would be really interesting to know, is how are you selecting field trial candidates? Because, number one, you've got to come across a company that is willing to try something new. So they've got a certain degree of trust, and they've probably gone through this process before, but everyone has to do this for the first time at some point.
So that's one thing.
Number two, I think I find on our end from the Louvre oil companies, you also have to have a lot of trust in that company to be doing the right thing by the trial. So you can develop a very robust kind of trial document or procedure or anything. But if people don't follow it, then that obviously runs you into trouble as well. So how do you kind of pick a candidate, and then how do you solicit feedback from them to help with development?
Would be an interesting thing to explore.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: Yeah, it's complicated, and it varies a lot depending on the applications. Some really simple ones that can happen out there is when you have stationary equipment that has a regular service interval. So an easy example is a big industrial electric motor. They usually are, several of them in the same facility. They're usually serviced by the same person every day or on a weekly schedule or whatever that is. And usually in that sort of trial, we could do, we'll set them up in different ways, but we would like. Usually the best case is to get everything in one go. So we would say, let's rebuild one of these motors with new bearings. Let's have one of these motors where we do a control product or what's worked for a long time, we'll run that. We'll have another one where we'll do a in situ compatibility test where instead of doing a new set of bearings, we just change the maintenance interval to switch to the new product and see if that changeover can be made on the fly. And then we may do another example where we do a cleaning, say, a big purge of grease with the new product and then run those. And then what we would do is on those sorts of bearings, we usually have a couple of outputs. You can usually measure the amount of power the motor is using. And then, especially in larger motors, there's a thermocouple that tells you the bearing temperature. And so we'll track this data over a fixed interval, maybe up to, you know, maybe it's a short interval, a thousand hours, or maybe it's a long one, it's 10,000 hours.
But we'll collect that data and see how the products compare, see how it did with the other things. And that's, that's like a best case scenario. And to get that sort of scenario, it tends to be easy because you can, you know, the worst case is that you damage a couple of bearings and an electric motor. It's something that's designed to be worked on. One shuts down, there tends to be redundancy, so the risk to the user is not so high. And the cost to us, if, say, we will pay for all new bearings, if there's any damage, we'll take care of it, we'll pay for the maintenance. The cost to us isn't very high, and there's great data. So that's the best case. Then you have the more complicated cases. If we go back to this construction example, we're say you want to work with a very large excavator. Well, if you want to compare products, you need to have at least two excavators, and they need to be doing the same work. And even on the same job site, this excavator is working in brackish water, you know, trenching out for building pylons while this one's moving topsoil all day. Very different working conditions, you know, impacts very soft. You get the picture. So it can be difficult to find the applications where you have multiple units doing the same work and similar duty cycles and even have the same sort of maintenance interval. So it can be very difficult. But our strategy usually is to work with customers that, like you mentioned, you have a good relationship with, you've been a supplier to for a long time. Usually bigger customers are better because they'll have multiple redundant units doing the same sort of work and then go in and then, you know, come up with a strategy to do your trial, to put your product in there. Maybe you furnish them free product. Maybe you say you rebuild some pins and bushings in an excavator or pair so that you have sort of new parts from the beginning. It's usually mutually beneficial situation. Uh, but you have to be careful about potential downtime and other things. And so it, there tends to be a conversation, you know, is this, is this an iterative change to a product you're making? Are you swinging for the fences with something very exotic, very different, where the risk is higher? So it's, it's a dialogue. It's a dialogue with, with customers and people in those applications and figuring out the best path to, to get the, get the work done.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting. All right, so now, in the stage of the process.
We've done our field trial. Maybe we get some data back and we have to make some adjustments. Maybe we don't. Maybe we get the sort of the green light at this stage.
We already very briefly discussed the fact that you've been making batches effectively by hand at this point. And so now we've got to take that product and manufacture it at scale. Now, like we said, what scale is hugely determined by market size, what the application is. Some of these, like I mentioned, very small volume, very high cost PFP e greases.
Maybe we're only making 100 kilos a year versus some of these bulk greases, where we're doing hundreds and hundreds of tons potentially every week for big mining applications. If anyone, he has ever been to Perth, you know, the road trains of just grease bins going from Perth to Kalgoorlie, it's insanity. So how does that process go? And to what extent would you and your team be involved in helping to scale up production from like, a simple lab bench sample all the way through to, like, the big, large scale? And then how are we verifying that the end product that comes out of manufacturing is the same and has the same properties as the one that we made up in the lab?
[00:37:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll say that it varies depending on the product chemistry. So, an easy example, we've made a new lithium complex grease, but our manufacturing facility makes lithium complex grease every day. So say we've changed the additive setup a little, or maybe we've added a little, a new step here and there. That process is relatively simple to employ. What we would likely do is we have our sort of handmade, bespoke formula that we've done in the lab. We would take that and likely build a set on a pilot reactor. And usually a pilot reactor will make somewhere between five and maybe 50 gallons of product and a single go. And that pilot reactor is going to be designed to kind of look like and feel like an industrial reactor. So it's going to have, you know, depending on what your system is, you could have, you know, circulating oil jackets for your heating. You could have pumps to move product around for milling and product transfer.
We like to use a type of pilot system that is reconfigurable, so that if I'm in my facility here that has this type of kettle, I can mix the same way. But if we use this kettle that has a different mixer, then I can kind of reconfigure my pilot to look like that. So you'll do a pilot batch after you build that pilot batch, you'll take it and you'll put it through probably a fair portion of the same laboratory testing that you did to the handmade batch. And if those properties all line up and look very good, you might have somebody else make a pilot batch there as well. So that way you can kind of rule out the. It takes a special operator to make this thing happen. It's not, you know, you often hear that Greece is sort of like a, more of an art than a science and it takes like a trained hand and there's, there's some truth to that. It does take a trained operator to make these products. So you may do a couple of pilot batches. If it looks consistent, things are coming out well, performance properties are staying in line. Then you may move on up to the industrial, we'll say the industrial pilot scale or industrial small batch, usually around 5000 gallons. So quite a bit more product, but you'll do that. And if you mess that one up, it's painful, but it's not 50,000, it's 5000. So you do that same thing. You'll put it through the laboratory, make sure the properties look the same. Often too. We'll do some chemical tests as well. Not just the tribological and structural tests, quick checks of things like FTIR spectroscopy, rRspectra, the same, or they very similar. That's good. Things like x ray diffraction, that's also useful for greases. So we'll start to build those things and say the product should look like this. And then if we make it at the bigger scale and it looks like that, then chances are we're in good shape for that product. But then you might have something that's not that simple. Case where I've built a new version of this, you kind of just transfer the recipe over, you do a few little pilots, everything looks good, you go into production, you say I come up with an exotic new type of thickener, right? That's going to be an entirely different process, one the synthesis is going to be different. So it's not going to be the same way that the guy standing at the 50,000 pound kettle has made stuff for forever. It's going to be a new process. So you'll still do that lab work, you'll still do that pilot work. But then when you go into the implementation side in the, the industrial scale, all new factors come into play. We may have to isolate this reactor because maybe our thickeners aren't compatible with others that are in the system. Now we may have to have all new training for the operators that run the kettle on a new synthesis profile. Heating and cooling steps are different. Mixing is different, materials that go into the reaction are different. You may have to have new raw material handling procedures in the facility. You have a new type of caustic agent, or there's a new acid or there's something, you know, something a little new that you have to implement. And so those sorts of things can take significant work as far as how far the formulators follow it. In that case, I will be standing over the first bot getting made in the factory personally. You'll follow it all the way through so that you can sort of help develop and coach the technology along, all the way up the chain and hopefully have a successful startup when you get finally over that hurdle to the industrial scale and product goes out to package.
[00:41:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome.
And I guess at the end of that, we have a grease, right? We took our product all the way from the conceptualization phase all the way through to now production. And so thanks, Jacob, for kind of going through all those steps and explaining. Here's all the decision points that we would use to help develop our grease. So, yeah, I think it's really interesting, and I love the kind of the side discussion about Greece as a platform because it is such a unique product and there are so many variations on it. And I think that does make it very difficult for field users. So for people who watch here who are either sales, marketing, or using greases in the field, it is a complex product. So try and get as educated as possible, because like we said, there are the variations, and using it is in many ways kind of an art in and of itself. So, yeah, so, Jacob, really appreciate you taking us through all of that information. I'm sure we'll get you back for another episode on Greece, but really appreciate your time. And, yeah, thanks for. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
[00:43:06] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Great conversation. Happy to do it. Anytime I.
