Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: G' day everyone. Welcome to Lubrication Experts. We are episode number 60 something at this stage and may have noticed the background behind me has changed because this is the first time I'm actually recording in the new quote unquote studio. It's actually just a home office, so I've been a bit quiet over the last couple of months because we've been building this, you know, it's an office come, come workshop.
So, so that's where we're going to be recording from now on. So if anyone was, I don't know, particularly attached to the old background, I'm very sorry but you know, this is just what it's going to look like from now on.
Now today I'm really, really excited to have a very special guest for what is effectively a re recording. So David Holt was, well, is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable person in this particular field and we are going to be talking all things zinc, which is probably the most popular topic that we see on, on this particular channel just because it pertains to engine oils, hydraulic oils, a lot of industrial lubricants as well.
And so it has pretty, pretty broad appeal. And there's always questions and misnomers about how much zinc can I have, how much is too much. You know, do, do classic cars need a certain amount of zinc? All of those kind of questions. So we're going to do a deep dive into zinc. How do we discover it? Where does it come from? And there's really no better person to talk to then Mr. David Holt. Now David.
So originally this, this podcast was actually an, sort of like an internal thing. I once upon a time used to record these when I was at Mobile. David was kind enough at the time because he was in the research and development team to do this very podcast, but it was kind of only for a mobile audience.
Now David retired about a year ago and he's now using his 30 years of expertise to do some occasional consulting work. So I will put, if you want any details you can, you know, you can go through me or I essentially put them in the description of the, of this, of this channel. And David has been really doing a lot of work in effectively like industrial and driveline fluids for the better part of 30 years with a background in additive chemistry as well. So he's now out on his own as DLGH consulting.
So, so dglh. There we go.
And so definitely look him up or get in contact with me.
So David is sort of under the lubrication experts banner as well. And so we're doing a bit of project work, so a bit of a preamble there, but we're going to get into the podcast. So zinc Z ddp. Everyone's kind of pretty familiar with it, but I thought it would help to go through a little bit of the history and the background. And so, David, if you. If you wouldn't mind, just kind of getting us started maybe with like, the origins of ZDP and kind of like, how did we discover it and when did we discover.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Was came out of research in the late 1930s where people were obviously driving the cars around, but had oil in there. But literally it was just base oil.
And all right, you might have had an oil in this agent like the old sulfurized esters you would get, you know, coming from the. You know, what people used to use to grease their axles with on the horse and cart and things like that. You would have those in there to help things prevent metal. Metal rubbing together.
But there was a lot of corrosion problems because those things were sulfurized sulfurized vegetable oils. Sulfur sulfur gets hot, it degrades, and it likes to attack things. So they were investigating lots of different molecules to help prevent corrosion and if anything, improve thermal stability.
And somebody had the bright idea of trying to use a thiophosphate.
I think they were probably found that those things were too aggressive to the materials, and so they ended up neutralizing them. They use zinc oxide. You have, therefore you have zdp, zinc dialkyl dithiophosphate.
There were two or three companies around at the time, but the most famous one is lubrizole. This is their. This is how they got started.
And as part of that corrosion study, which it was effective as to some extent, they found it was oils that had ZDDP in had a lot less wear than those that didn't.
And so then the research began. And then late 1940s, the V8 engines come along, a lot more pressure on the valve train.
And suddenly there was a need for things that prevented wear.
And lo and behold, ZDDP took off and was within 10 years. Everybody was making it. And at huge volumes. It went from like this much to this much in a decade because people had discovered what it could do. Don't really at the time, nobody really understood how it did it.
They just understand that it did it.
And at the time, certainly in the late 40s, early 50s, there wasn't a lot of understanding about the influence of the alcal chain and how that affected the performance. And we'll get into that later on when we talk about the different types of zddp, but it was just, yes, it works.
It's cost effective to make and it dissolves up easily in oil. Thank you very much.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Because obviously in 1950s there was no such thing as catalytic converters. People weren't worried about phosphorus content and then they began to find the added effect that it was also an effective antioxidant, especially at hydroperoxide decomposition.
And so it is a dual functionality, although if it converts to the antioxidant mode, it may not be as effective anti wear.
It's, it's a trade off. It doesn't do both jobs well at the same time. It kind of does one or the other.
So that, that's its origins and it has evolved into a highly specialized understanding additive manufacturing base.
The big four additive companies all make Z DDPs.
That class of molecule and one other class, the dispersants are the ones that, if you look at the patent literature, are the most closely protected by patent ZDDPs and dispersants are the most closely protected molecules by the big four additive manufacturers because it's their lifeblood.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really interesting though, if you.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Especially in the engine oil area, understanding the relationships between dispersants and ZDDPs, you know, they'll all buy and trade from each other and they're all using everybody else's additives if depending on who makes what and who has the chemical footprint to make what easily. But not dispersants and ZDDPs, they are absolutely locked down tight.
As the patents come offline, a new ZDDP comes along with a new set of patents to protect it.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Yeah, interesting. That's really interesting.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: So you've alluded a little bit to what it does. So you know, we talked about the fact that it's a multifunctional additive, so a bit of antioxidancy as well as some anti wear properties, maybe kind of. Two questions if you wouldn't mind going into a little bit more detail about the what of, you know, its anti wear performance. How is it, how is it doing that? And maybe also how do we know what it does?
[00:08:18] Speaker B: We know what it does because there's been an awful lot of research.
Everybody's looked into this and Rafe and I were talking earlier, before we started, I was doing a little bit of research. This, we will put this in the, in the chat at the end or in the notes at the end of the podcast though, if anybody's interested. There's a very good paper by Hugh Spikes of Imperial College in London and it's in tribology Letters came out in 2004 and the title of the paper is the history and mechanisms of ZDDP and that outlines over a 40 year period. It's basically a brief history of a 40 of the amount of research that's gone in to understanding how a ZDDP behaves and the how the understanding has evolved. And as analytic and as new analytical tool tools have come online first they just yes, it does wear, it protects against anti wear and it's fairly robust. It doesn't rub off, you can't rub it off. It once it's on there, it's glued.
And that was, that was fine. And then I guess in the 1970s, oil embargo, fuel economy, everybody suddenly got religion about reducing friction.
How and it was then the work in discovered that well, ZDDP oils actually have high friction. And so they went back and looked and they worked out that the chemistry reaction between the ZDDP molecule and the metal surface produces actually a very thick film, which is why it's very effective as an anti wear. But it produces a thick film and that thick film can have an impact on friction.
I won't say it's bad for friction because sometimes thick films you want high friction depending on the lubricant. It's just it's understanding that if you have ZDDP there you it will influence the frictional performance of the oil.
For an engine oils chasing a fuel economy number in a sequence testing it's probably things that they don't want.
But you put the ZDDP in a manual transmission fluid where you're talking about controlling friction, then high friction can be very useful.
So it depends on the application you're putting into whether it has inverted commas, a negative effect on friction.
Everybody talks about ZDDP which is an abbreviation for zinc dialkyl dithiophosphate.
And there's three parts to that molecule. There's the zinc, there's the alkyl and then there's the thiophosph.
Everybody pronounces it zinc dialkyl dithiophosphate.
But if you were to phonetically pronounce it in terms of the active molecule, the molecule that actually part of that molecule that does the job, you will be talking about zinc dialkyl dithiophosphate.
And unfortunately we of the oil industry have not corrected people when they put the emphasis on the word zinc.
It's not you don't want zinc.
I can give you additives that Will got a lot of zinc in and you'll wear your engine out very quickly. Zinc diethyl carbonates, for example, really good rust inhibitors, lousy wear, but they got zinc in.
So it's, it's the dialkyl dithiophosphate part of the molecule that does its job. And zinc oxide is a very cheap effective way to help neutralize the thiophosphoric acid to give you the neutral salt.
The alkyl chain becomes important because it affects the activity and how, how quickly that molecule starts to work.
You have, it's an alcohol. It's based on an alcohol they use when they make these molecules. Basically it's phosphorus, pentasulfide, alcohol and zinc oxide all mixed together at the appropriate concentrations in an appropriate reactor and you end up with a ZDPing at the end of it.
Primary alcohols are much more thermally stable so they don't degrade with heat as fast, but they are a little bit slower to react.
So historically Speaking, primary Z DDPs were used in heavy duty diesel engine oils because diesel engines run hotter than petrol engines.
And the secondaries were used in petrol engines because they activated at a much lower temperature and so gave you that cannon tap it protection much faster.
However, it also means that you couldn't really heat those oils too high in storage manufacture otherwise because if you, if you overheated them during manufacturer manufacturer the ZEP will start to degrade and it just won't work once it's actually in the engine. That's okay because as it starts to degrade it's then got a metal surface to work on and everything else. But in terms of manufacturing you're blending the oil.
Anybody who's BL who's experienced at blending engine oils or hydraulic fluids knows that once the once if you're going to put the, the additive package in, you can't, it can't be above 50 degrees C.
That's where you limit it to on, on the production.
Otherwise if you're not careful you'll start to smell rotten eggs and hydrogen sulfide and the captains and yeah, okay, the thing's gone off.
The other thing was that if you move over to the industrial arena for a minute. Hydraulics, everybody used to use secondary ZDTPs and hydraulics and the reason they did was because it was cheap and effective and highly available because it was coming from the, it was made for the automotive markets.
However, they are very susceptible to water attack. They are hydrolytically unstable.
And if people have got long enough memories around the late 80s with the big heavy duty piston pumps.
One time anti wears were banned in them because of this problem. But the designs at the time you really didn't need any anti wearing. But once, once, once the ZDP degraded it would go after the copper and the pistons.
So late 80s you had ZDDPs for vein pumps and R and O oils for piston pumps.
But then they worked out well actually.
And then the, the, the, the equipment manufacturers, people like Denison and Vickers started to put pump tests in place and it was worked out fairly quickly that to pass these pump tests, especially if any water was present, you had to have primaries head ddps.
So it's almost impossible now to find a secondary ZDP in a hydraulic fluid. If you are, it's, it was probably made, it was probably made in the 1980s and has been left in a, in a cupboard some and come out. So that's, it's just really a sense to give you an idea of how important that alcohol or the Alkal group is in how the molecule performs. It's not just thrown together. There is, there is actually a very careful science behind all, all of this now in how the additive companies design this molecule.
And why zinc because it's cheap.
You can use other metals, but zinc, because it's cheap, Zinc oxide is cheap.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean that's a sort of like an awesome kind of overview of the different zinc types and you know, applications where we typically use them maybe just to jump a little bit or drill down on the, the hydraulics.
Because one of the big shifts that we're seeing in the hydraulic market is like a divergence between the zinc containing and the zinc free hydraulic fluids.
One thing that I've seen a fair bit, especially in some mining applications where you know, let's say more efficient mobile hydraulic packs are getting up there in terms of temperature and we're starting to see a lot of sludge issues.
And a lot of the mobile hydraulics OEMs seem to be bifurcating into, you know, you've got Caterpillar who's still demanding 900 parts per million zinc and then you've got some of the Japanese OEMs who are demanding zinc free hydraulic oils. So could you please help explain maybe the differences there and what are the drivers behind that?
[00:17:43] Speaker B: The, the driver is the weakness of the one weakness that ZDDP has and that, that is its thermal stability.
If you, I'm not talking about oxidative stability, I'm just talking about pure heat here.
So if you were to put ZDDP z DDP containing hydraulic oil in the oven at 135C for a couple of weeks, it would come out looking black.
And that's not because the oil has oxidized, it hasn't. There's no oxygen, it's just heat and it's salt. The way the sulfur is wrapped up or is included in this molecule and how it's attached to things, it is not thermally stable, it has a weakness to heat.
And the non zinc based or the ashless anti wear additives, amine phosphates, ashless DDPs, for example, ashless means nonmetal containing the way certainly in the national steed, yes, you still have the sulfur phosphorus there, but the design of the molecule is different and it's different in such a way that it does not degrade with heat.
So that's the way you're going with mobile hydraulics. Certainly the way Japanese, the Japanese guys are going is they are pushing the temperatures on those machines.
Reservoirs are getting infinitely smaller compared to what they used to be. The oil has no time to relax, recover. And I'm not sure how big the coolers are.
So if you're running high pressure, high heat and you want to run an extended drain, you're going to go, you're going to want a non zing, a non metal, let's put it this way, a non metal anti wear additive, the amine phosphates or the ashless ddps for example, it's going to be the way.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: You go.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: And it'll be predominantly phosphorus.
And I'm going to segue into something completely different in a minute because it's important.
But that, that's the way you'll go. If you are so you and, and because it doesn't degrade, you don't have the sludge because when the system degrades it's the sulfur collapsing in this, in the ZDDP and it's the zinc oxide comes out.
Everything just ends up in sludge.
If you're running an industrial hydraulic system, low pressure and you're keeping in at 50 degrees C, ZDDP oils will run all day perfectly.
The disadvantage or perceived disadvantage I should say for the ashless anti wears is historically they've always been expensive and it's just purely simple volume production. ZDP is made on a massive scale for the automotive market.
And the molecules that we, the anti wears that we use in hydraulics aren't really used in that market. Therefore the volume is lower. Therefore it costs more to make. It's as simple as that the other thing I want to segue into because it's relevant and we're going to digress. Meander a little bit, we'll come back.
People use the words anti wear and extreme pressure in the same sentence almost as though they are interchangeable molecules.
And the danger becomes is when people think they are interchangeable because they're both. Especially on the ashless side. The, the extreme pressures are sulfur phosph and ashliss anti weary sulfur phos.
But it's a different type of sulfur, it's a different amount of sulfur and they do very different jobs.
An extreme pressure additive is usually a lot of sulfur in the form of a sulfurized isobutene, probably married to or incorporating some amine phosphate there.
But the amount of sulfur used is huge, comparatively speaking to the anti wear additives.
Extreme pressure additives are designed when they react with the metal surface.
They're designed to make iron sulfide.
Iron sulfide, comparatively speaking, is soft.
And so when the gear teeth mesh come in contact and you've got that really, really high point pressure on the gear tooth, they actually slide across each other. The iron sulfide gives a little because it's soft and it allows the teeth to slide.
If you put those kind of molecules in a hydraulic system, the higher temperatures will cause that sulfurized isobutene to collapse instantly. So you will have a lot of sludge and blackened gunk.
But you'll also have a lot of wear because in a hydraulics and or in an engine you have a lot of tap, tap, tap. It's not high point pressure. So you actually want a hard, hard protective surface on the metal surface, not something that's going to give.
Conversely, if you put an anti wear in a gearbox and you have those hard surfaces, when those gear teeth mesh and you have that really high point pressure, they're going to shatter because they're not going to give. There's nothing to give.
Simple analogy is take a hammer and a piece of rubber tubing. You hit the rubber tubing and the hammer bounces. All right? That's the ep.
You put the rubber in liquid nitrogen, pull it out, smack it with a hammer and shatters. That's what happens when you put anti wear in a gear. In a gear system.
It will get too hard, too hard surfaces collapse under high pressure. Things will shatter.
So when one talks about ashless anti wears, just need to, people need to make sure they ask the right questions to make sure they're not getting an EP additive which is also ashless in the hydraulic Systems and vice versa. They are two very separate classes of molecules.
But over time people have merged the terminology and sometimes when they talk about EP they say anti wear ep. They literally just say that. And no, no, they are very, very separate beasts and designed to do very different jobs in terms of like the.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Film formation in, in my head at least, and this is probably oversimplified EP additives sort of chemically react with the metal surface and form that iron sulfide versus an anti wear which almost sits on top right of the metal surface.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: It sits on top but there is a reaction. There's a bit.
Originally they thought it was adsorbed onto the metal surface and there may be that to start with but as it activates there is a reaction.
Now one of the unique things about Z DDBs is that they've been around for 40 years and nobody still really knows what the structure is on the surface. The analytical tools haven't got that. It's glass, it's a forms of phosphate glass. We know it forms a glass but because it forms a glass it's very hard to work out which what molecule is connected to what Inside of that glass you've obviously got the iron surface. You have some of the sulfur from the dithiophosphate, zinc might be trapped in there. You certainly got phosphorus in there and it's about 200 nanometers thick. Is that that, that's that glass surface.
A lot of people did some work again, I think Hugh Spikes did some where once the testing lab testing equipment came on, improved, they could put a sapphire glass, sapphire glass, steel ball on a sapphire glass. I they could measure the thickness of the see that the film's forming and they found out that molecules like the amine phosphates produced a much thin, thinner anti wear film.
But when you ran the anti wear tests they gave just as good as, if not better anti wear protection than the ZDPs.
So people then began to realize it was nothing. It wasn't really to do with the size of the film thickness that gave you the anti wear. It's, it's how the molecules themselves bonded and form that tight layer.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Interesting.
So it sounds like we need to do an extra episode with a deep dive onto extreme pressure additives. Let's leave those aside for a second.
You've already described a couple of instances where you wouldn't want to use ZDDP or anti wear additives in general.
Are there any other circumstances aside from, you know, high temperature hydraulics? We've already talked about gearboxes.
Any other situations where you would not want to use a DDP.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: Turbines, but especially got a gearbox in there, you wouldn't want to use them in there because turbines, basically anything that's running hot, turbines run hot.
And turbine oils, again, most industrial oils, how shall put it do. You got this much additive system in an industrial oil, turbine oil, hydraulic oil, even a gear oil. You got this much in an engine oil and you change your engine oils on a regular, be it 6,000, 8,000, 10,000, 12,000 miles, it doesn't matter. There is a schedule where you drop that oil out.
Yeah, drop a turbine oil out maybe once every five years if you're lucky.
Yes, you're doing top ups for things to do it, but you're not bringing a turbine down every, every six months to change the oil.
So the, the, the amount of additives you put in there are low. They're designed to do a job.
And once you put an additive into the fluid to do a job, you usually got to put something else in to fix the problem that the additive caused. Yeah, because it'll do its job, but it causes a problem somewhere else and then you put something else in to fix that.
So yes, engines run hot, but they have a lot more antioxidants in, they have a lot more dispersants in to carry the sludge around because the things degrade. They have a lot of detergents into neutralized Broadway gases. And so you end up with a huge additive system, comparatively speaking to an industrial industrial oil.
And they change those things out because everything they put in is compensating for another, another issue.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: Maybe one other question aside from, you know, why wouldn't you want to use their ddp? Are there also any kind of like upper limits to how much you can use? Because I've, I've seen it reported.
You know, basically this, this gets to sort of the consumer category of oils, right. Where either people use ZDP boosters or in some cases you get companies sort of advertising how much zinc is in that. We use 20002500 parts per million, whatever the number is. And I have seen some kind of research suggesting that once you go beyond 1400 ish parts per million that you may run yourself into corrosion issues. So if you know anything about that.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: You may, it depends how the oil is formulated.
The thing with anti wear additives and this doesn't apply, this isn't specific to zttb, it's specific to all of them. There's a point of no return.
You have a finite fixed amount of metal. Metal that it's got to get to and it's also competing with the rust inhibitor to get there. It's also competing with the friction modifier if there's a fixture modifier in there.
And so there's just a finite amount of surface.
So if you put the anti wear in at a certain level, it will go to the surface and then no more can get to the surface until something gets rubbed off.
So just to protect the surface, you probably don't need that much anti wear.
But if the application has a lot of rubbing, like a cam and tap it for example, or a vein pump, that surface there is actually going to be that protective wear surface eventually will get worn off. And so what you have to have in the oil is a reserve that then comes back to the goes then goes to the surface.
For example, there was one hydraulic fluid that Mobil used to sell, I guess got 2000 ppm ZDP in and it's for one customer. It's for an Eaton product production plant.
And it's that goes on their testing stand.
It's and it's not the R D testing sand, it's the testing every single pump that comes out of that manufacturing plant when they spin it up to make it, you need that amount of zinc sat there because it's seeing fresh metal all the time. And so that's what it comes down to. If you're not doing that then there's a point. Then there's no point putting the extra in because you're just giving money away, always wasting money.
I think the issue with the extra corrosion would be is if it's not balanced.
If you put too much in and you don't balance the fact you've got too much there, you it will overpower the ant the rust inhibitor.
And that would be the danger I would say with anybody doing top ups with ZDDP in is, especially with inservice oils, is yes, you put it in. Yes, you might be topping your anti wear, but do you need to top your anti wear unless you got signs of wear?
And if you do while the oil's used, how much rusting temperature have you got left in there?
I know you're just suddenly unbalancing it all and now you're going to have a corrosion problem because the rust inhibitor can't get to the surface.
So that that's where the corrosion comes in is it comes in is a formula to do their job properly.
Like CAT has a high ZDDP number and those engines work fine.
And going back to the Other conversation earlier about the excavators and CAT for whatever reason run a very tight control on that oil temperature so it doesn't get too hot. So they don't have the over, they don't have the thermal stability problems. I think that in their design of their, their excavators and all their earth move equipment they put a lot of heat exchanger in there and they don't let the operational temperature get above about 60 degrees C.
That's how they run with the amount of ZDDP they do. Whereas other people probably are running a lot hotter.
But then they are not. You're not paying for that much as much copper to go on your heat exchanger.
Yeah, neither. There's no wrong, right or wrong here. That's just, it's just different design manufacturing approaches.
I don't think there's anything else. It's, it's. I would be very careful with anybody who's saying oh top up your anti.
I've seen it done with antioxidants and there's one company who's making who is the leader in that. And there's a lot of science that's flu tech and they do a lot of science behind that.
They're running it, they're running the used oil analysis and they're determining it. And okay, if you throw the extra antioxidant in certainly in the turbine oils, you're really not going to do that much harm unless you.
Especially if you have the right filters, those resin filters in place like they sell or heliard cells or EPT cells, they're okay.
But antioxidants is where you can have too much of a good thing. But that could be a different podcast.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: A lot of spin outs to this episode would be the yes MCU equivalent.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: Because again there are molecules where yes, you can have too much of a good thing.
Zedps, yes you can, but too much. If the oil's balanced correctly when it's formulated and they have a high amount in well there's probably a lot of giveaway in there.
If somebody hasn't balanced it right then you're going to have corrosion problems. But then you're probably not going that probably. Oil probably wouldn't actually ever be commercialized because it would fail the tests it had to pass in the first place.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: So maybe one of the more obvious questions, I mean we started out this episode by saying it was discovered in 1930.
That makes it almost hundred year old technology at this point.
[00:35:32] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: So why haven't we found anything better yet?
[00:35:38] Speaker B: Money, money.
It's cheap, it cost effective and it works.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: Next question.
Fair enough.
[00:35:47] Speaker B: There are, there are other, there are other molecules out there that do work, I think that are better. But you run up against money, you go, you have an installed manufacturing price of ZDDP and zinc is cheap.
Copper DDPs, I love them.
I haven't been around for 30, for 25 years.
I came across them when I first started out in so late 80s.
Both Paramins at the time and L Resol made them highly, highly effective in terms of antioxidancy protection and wear protection. Maybe not quite as thermally stable as the zincs, but these things in the test we were doing, they were really, really good.
But copper is expensive compared to zinc.
Simple as that.
You will, you can with metal, metal exchange. If you have unpassivated copper in your system and you have a ZDDP containing oil, you may end up making copper DDP in your oil. People often mistake that for copper corrosion and it can if, if, if people don't know what they're looking for.
Can cause a bit of backwards and forwards between the oil supply and the customer.
But it's actually relatively easy to see if your copper starts to climb and then plateaus.
It's probably the ZDDP and an unpassivated copper surface like a COP heat exchanger or whatever and it's just passivating. And the copper you're seeing in the oil is actually copper ddp. So you just make a better look, better oil than you did. Can you put one in? If the copper keeps climbing, it's a very different problem.
Then you've got a copper erosion corrosion problem.
Molybdenum is used, you can buy those on the market.
Usually they are used where you are trying to get lower friction than with Z. DDPs have a bit of a bad reputation unfortunately. When they first came out, I think it was Molavan A or the earlier versions, they didn't get the balance with the sulfur right and they were a bit more aggressive, the sulfur was a bit more aggressive.
And I'm going back 25 years. They've, things have come on a long way now and again you get this exchange. You, you know, you. Most engine oils on the market Today, they've got 750pp ppm. Molybdenum usually sat in there somewhere, usually in the form of a thiocarbonate or a related chemistry.
But when that thiocarbomate sees the zinc Z ddp it's all change hands and you know, ring a ring of roses and you end up with a Moly DDP and a zinc thiocarbonate.
And they all work hand in hand to give you the wear protection and the low friction deposits past sequence 6, whichever version of it is today test.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: And to get you the better fuel economy.
So there are things out there that will do it. It's just the install based on the production and zinc oxide is cheap and it works.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting.
As we kind of wrap up these episodes, I always like to kind of get a glimpse into the future.
ZDB seems to be a little bit under pressure. So in the sense that, you know, with concerns about the catalytic converters and all that sort of stuff, you know, in a lot of the, let's say modern specs, the allowable limits on things like phosphorus and sulfur seem to be creeping lower.
[00:39:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: Although there's not really been a, you know, a big step change. And in fact, you know, when you look at the API, I think both the S and the C categories, there's actually a minimum phosphorus spec that you need to meet in order to qualify.
So it seems like, you know, it's not going anywhere anytime soon. But what would you see as the future of the molecule?
[00:39:56] Speaker B: I don't think it's going anywhere soon.
It's too effect too effective at what it does.
Yes, there is pressure on the phosphorus for the catalytic converters, but if the amine phosphates and or the other ashlissanti wares that we use in industrial oils in the industrial world, if they were effective in engines, we'd have been using them a long time ago. But they're not.
I don't know why my chemistry, organic chemistry, isn't that good. As to why these things don't work as well as their DDPs do, I'm fairly certain it's to do with the structure of the sulfur and the phosphorus and how it's all wrapped up and the alcohol chain. But they're not as effective and so that's why people don't use them or haven't used them in the past. I think when the whole response to CAT poisoning, phosphorus poisoning comes out, people would have jumped on them. Yes, they're still phosphorus containing, but you need a lot less of them to do the job.
I think it, if people were like the DDP molecule, I would say maybe look at copper again just because I think you could use a lot less of it to get the same bang for your bucket so much. It's far more powerful molecule.
But whether anybody will invest the time and effort to do that is a different question. You know, electric cars don't need engine oils, so there is that to consider. However, there are alternatives being looked at. Hydrogen for example, gas engines.
You run hydrogen in a natural gas engine instead of natural gas and nothing seems to change from a lubricant perspective. So it's not going anywhere there.
So if they bring hydrogen fuel cells or hydrogen transportation in, I still think they're going to stay with zdp.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: Would, would the effect of the flame temperature have any effect on the use of zddp? Because I've seen.
[00:42:05] Speaker B: If the operational temperature changes significantly. It might, yeah.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: I'm only saying that because I've seen a few of the kind of modern natural and sour gas engine oils often contain either no zinc or very low levels. I was wondering if that's related to, you know, the combustion temperature.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. Well, sometimes it's to do with ash. They don't want ash forming because in those, in those engines the primary source of ash is the zp.
Well, in the natural one. In the sour gas maybe not. You may have detergents in there for neutralizing stuff. Natural ones maybe. No, because I know him, Imperial Oil for a long time, early 80s had no.
I was there 95. So even in the mid 90s they had a range of ashless gas engine oils for depending on where you wanted, where you were playing at. So if they push the temperature too high, we will have to find an alternative.
And that's where people may come back to looking at the molecules we use in, in hydraulics and seeing how we can get them to work or how can they be adapted to work in an engine environment.
I think if there had been a wonder additive that could have replaced it, it would have done by now.
And I think people are probably.
If I was in the DDP development business, I might be holding my keeping my powder dry until I figured out what was going on with the engine oil market.
The past car.
Let's try, let's rephrase that propulsion market.
Is everybody going to jump on and go full electric?
I'm not sure they are. I think Volvo, for example, have now announced that they are not pursuing their all electric lineup from whatever it is and no other propulsion units.
Toyota have bet very differently.
I think. I think ultimately there will be a mix in there and what that mix looks like is not yet known.
So I think people are probably going to keep their powder dry to decide what is the lubrication regime.
I mean there's going to be a need for these molecules for a long time. You're not going to change the entire marketplace over from internal combustion to some that, you know, even if they stop making them today, that the marketplace is huge because the car exists today, still need oil to lubricate.
So I don't think it's going anywhere soon. I think. Is the future clear? No, I think it's cloudy.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: Well, on that note, David, thank you so much for your time.
I'm sure that'll be very enlightening for a lot of people who have a lot of interest in this particular molecule. Again, because, you know, it's used so widely, this tends to generate a lot of interest. So really appreciate your time and your insight as well. And we'll definitely have to have you back on for some follow ups, ep, antioxidants, all sorts of stuff. So thank you.
[00:45:22] Speaker B: Yes.
Okay. Thank you very much.
