What is it about?
Vegetable oil is plentiful and cheap, and is of course used in cooking. But there are many seed oils, like linseed oil, that are inedible, and so they could be used as fuel, as in biodiesel, or in more specialty uses, for example as lubricants. This work explores the synthesis and viscosity properties of a completely novel type of lubricant, easily made from vegetable oil.
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Why is it important?
Thousands of man hours have been spent developing and refining the products we use everyday that come from petroleum. Think of motor oil in your engine, or any place metal parts come in contact and need to be lubricated--that lubricant is based on petroleum. One aspect of lubrication is the "thickness" of the oil, or its viscosity. Viscosity is influenced by the molecular structure of the individual molecules in the oil. One aspect of structure that has a big effect on viscosity is molecular branching. This work make it very easy to add branching of many different branch lengths to lubricant molecules, to facilitate the study of the effects on viscosity.
Perspectives
Making a new compound is a thrill. Nowhere else on earth, or maybe even in the whole universe, has the compound ever existed before. A new substance, born of your own imagination and effort in the lab. If you can find a practical application for the new compound, then not only is it new, it might even be useful for something. This is what is meant by "applied chemistry."
Jonathan Filley
Oligometrics, Inc.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: New lubricants from vegetable oil: cyclic acetals of methyl 9,10-dihydroxystearate, Bioresource Technology, March 2005, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.biortech.2004.06.017.
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