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Synthetic Lubricants and the Environment

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Abstract

The benefits of synthetic lubricant base stocks are derived not only from the basic molecular structures but from the absence of harmful molecular species often unavoidably present in conventional mineral oils in small, but significant, concentrations. There are very many compounds in crude oil, and while many, or most, of the harmful ones are removed or upgraded by refining, depending on the methods used, a significant number will inevitably remain in lubricating oil stocks, whether solvent- or hydro treated. Thus, conventional oils comprise a wide variety of molecular species, many of which are not well characterized. Synthesized hydrocarbons are now used for a wide range of industrial and automotive applications and are, by far, the segment with the greatest growth rate in the synthetic lubricant field.

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Correspondence to Ignatio Madanhire .

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Madanhire, I., Mbohwa, C. (2016). Synthetic Lubricants and the Environment. In: Mitigating Environmental Impact of Petroleum Lubricants. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31358-0_5

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