Study of Friction and Wear Characteristic of Jatropha Oil Blended Lube Oil

Abstract

The revolution in industrialization throughout the world has boosted the utilization of machinery and shifted the muscle power to machines. The use of machines in various sectors has increased the demand of petroleum based lubricants. Lubricants act as an antifriction media, facilitating smoother working, reducing the risks of undesirable frequent failures and maintaining reliable machine operations among different rotating parts of machines. Due to the depleting of petroleum resources and environment concern, the demand of non-edible vegetable oil based lubricants has increased as well. In this regard, the effect of the Jatropha oil blended with lube oil on the friction and wear characteristics has been investigated in this paper. Experiment has been carried out by using Cygnus Wear Testing Machine under the load of 30N, a high rotating speed of 2000rpm and one hour of running. Lubricant SAE 40 has been used as a base lubricant in this study. The experiment has been conducted on aluminium pins and cast iron disc which lubricated with Jatropha oil blended bio-lubricant (JBL). To prepare the bio-lubricant, 0%, 20%, 30%, 40% and 50% by volume of Jatropha oil were blended with lubricant SAE 40. In order to understand the characteristics of lubricant, viscometer and multi oil analyser tests have been conducted. It has been found that 10% of Jatropha oil bio-lubricant gives lowest wear and creates less amounts of heat than others samples, and with above 10% contamination, the wear and lubricating temperature increases significantly.