Novitas Chem Solutions
Innovative SA and SBO serving the lubricant industry

By Phil Levy, V.P., Sales and Marketing, Novitas Chem Solutions, LLC | TLT CMF Plus November 2016

Novitas Chem Solutions, LLC is a specialty additive and synthetic base oil company providing innovative and high performance products (Figure 1) and solutions for industrial oil, grease, metal working and food grade applications. An overview of our products is shown in Figure 1, as an example, we offer 16 products which are HX-1 certified and of these, 5 are Kosher certified. Today, we wish to present Novitas’ R&D innovations from the past year for three categories, antioxidant, corrosion inhibitor, and anti-wear additives, Figure 2.


Figure 1. An overview of Novitas Specialty Additive and Base Oil Products


Figure 2. Innovations in Three Categories of Products: Antioxidants, Corrosion Inhibitor, and Anti-wear Additives

These efforts are our resolves to provide you the highest quality products and our commitment to offer the best performance for your finished fluids and greases which need to meet today’s ever more demanding and difficult challenges:
• Antioxidant: Lower cost and superior performing antioxidants for high temperature applications
• Corrosion Inhibitor: Top performing rust preventive for water based MWF application
• Antiwear: Innovative options to  reduce wear and frictional heat generated during lubrication

Antioxidant: AO-1901 and AO-1903
Antioxidants have gained increasing importance for automotive and industrial lubrications so to enhance/extend the useful life of these products. This leads to the development of Novitas 1903 and 1901. Using PDSC (210C under 500 psi oxygen condition, (Figure 3) as a screening tool, we add 0.5% Antioxidants to AN23 base oil. Included in this testing were our commercial candidates (AO-1248, 1902, and 1308), competitive antioxidants and new alternatives.


Table 1. We went further by reducing the dosage (in PAO 6/AN23: 1: 1 base oil, see Table 1) to 0.25% where AO-1901 again outperform the leading/top performance antioxidant (also a DTC additive) by 40%.


Figure 3. Antioxidant Screening via PDSC
Novitas 1901 (A DTC additive) clearly offers superior performance with more than 200 min. induction time while AO-1903, a novel and cost effective liquid blend of AO-1248 and AO-1308, was shown to outperform AO-1308 as well as commercial antioxidants.


Figure 4. Cast Ion Chip Testing
In this endeavor we (Figure 4) found surprisingly a great number of alternative candidates (mono-substitued and some di-substituted included) did not work under the cast iron chip. CI-4002 is a direct replacement of the competitive di-acid via cast ion chip testing. CI-4003 is 25% more effective.

Corrosion Inhibitors: CI-4004 and CI-4002
Many rust preventives used for water based coolants today are carboxylic type chemistry such as Corfree M1, which has become obsolete.

Most notably we have developed a novel/proprietary rust preventive candidate, CI-4004, that outperforms all other options by a wide margin in cast iron testing, achieving a passing result with 50:1 dilution of 5% TEA/MEA based concentrate.


Figure 5. Humidity Cabinet, 1% (30 days Test)
The humidity cabinet testing is used in industry as a measure for long term rust performance. In Figure 5 we tested samples @1% dosage (neutralized with TEA/MEA). Sample M is Corfree M1 that lasted for 16 days, Sample C is a dicarboxylic chemistry made via fermentation process and it lasted for three days. Only CI-4002 passed the 30-days without any sign of rust.

Antiwear: AW-3211, 3903, 3110 and 3111
Antiwear additives are a critical component for all lubrication. They are used to minimize wear in the mixed-lubrication region. In the 2015 STLE commercial forum we introduced AW-3211 a low odor and P/S/N containing additive and a FZG booster, that was capable of reducing ISO 68 polyol ester at a low dosage (0.25%). This is a rather significant accomplishment as polyol esters would normally compete with the usual anti-wear additives. In the practical field of lubrication neutral anti-wear additives, such as neutral TPPT and organophosphate OP-3305, are more desirable/adopted by OEM and many applications which demand balanced performance, for instance, for better demuslibility, less foam, and system compatibility. Unfortunately, however, due to surface competition with ISO 68 POE base oil, these neutral AW additives require up to 3% to significantly reduce wear scar in the four-ball wear testing (ASTM D4172 (40kgf, 1200 rpm, 1 hour, and 75C). Adding to our AW portfolio is a novel anti-wear synergist, AW-3903, that is even more effective than AW-3211, and is synergistic with TPPT and OP-3305, giving rise to outstanding AW performance with significantly less dosages (see Table 2, AW-3110 and AW-3111).


Table 2. Achieving and delivering such an additive synergy to the field of lubrication is a vital part of lubricant formulation where one must design/formulate with the performance and system requirements in mind, and of course, with the top quality and varieties of specialty additives.

Conclusion
Novitas today provides not only top quality specialty additives but also offers unique synergism and formulation know-how that give the optimal/ best performance to meet demanding lubricant requirements. We offer P-and S- as well as N/S heterocycle chemistry and will continue to support developments required for industrial oil, grease, and metal working industry.