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The Football Revolution

fuel-lubricantsI think it was the great Liverpool F. C. manager Bill Shankly who once professed that football wasn’t a matter of life and death – it was more important than that. But strangely enough, the words – ‘football’, ‘life’, and ‘oils’ have all come together recently making substantial improvements to gearbox durability especially those with sequential changes.

Transmission oils are similar, in many ways, to your typical engine crankcase product; they need excellent viscosity/temperature characteristics if at high temperature the oil is not to be squeezed away between mating gear teeth and at low temperature they are not too ‘thick’ to create power-sapping viscous drag. The oil is said to require a high viscosity index or VI and to produce this effect, ‘thin’ oils will be blended with viscosity modifiers (VMs) – long chain polymers which become active when hot and offset the tendency for the base oil to thin. However under the incessant shearing action of the gear teeth and shock loads particularly those within sequential gearboxes, these long chain VMs get chopped up and cease to function after a while. At this point enter the role of the extreme pressure or EP additive.

Designed to cling to the metal parts when the oil film disappears, the EP additive is an essential element to all gearbox oils. Until recently these additives have been based on Zinc DialkylDithioPhosphate or ZDDP and is the substance that gives off that somewhat sweet pungent smell which hangs around any gearbox or differential. However, in gearboxes, as in engine crankcase oils, the use of these is now not always desirable and so the race is on to find other less active sulphur-phosphate compounds. One solution has been the addition of solid lubricants – graphite and molybdenum disulphide, to the mix. Here these dry powder layers when added to the oil slide over each other reducing friction and preventing wear, but issues with each - graphite settling out in the oil filter and the intense colour of ‘black moly’ staining everything it comes into contact with, make them not particularly attractive for widespread use. Another approach and one developed only recently, has been the introduction of inorganic fullerenes, or IFs for those in the know.

Discovered in 1985, fullerenes are a family of carbon allotropes – molecules composed entirely of carbon in the form of hollow spheres, ellipsoids, tubes or planes. When spherical, they can often be referred to as ‘Buckyballs’ after Richard Buckminster Fuller whose shell-shape or lattice-structure they resemble. Indeed the shape of the F.A. football is based around a C60 fullerene comprising of a mixture of hexagonal rings interspersed with pentangles. The beauty of the fullerene is that apart from being very stable, having no or very few ‘lose ends’ and with the ability to ‘nest’ rather like onion rings, they work on a nano level as opposed to the considerably smaller molecular level of other solid lubricants. If you like, fullerenes act more like ball bearings, the covalent bonds linking the inorganic components together while the weak Van-der-Waal bonds allow each layer to slide over the next. Chemically unreactive and therefore highly resistant to oxidation, fullerenes also do not degrade much over time. With characteristics such as this, and impressing all those teams having used gearbox oils containing it, expect to see more of this nanotechnology in the future.

And what can be more important than life and death, but the durability of your gearbox?


Written by John Coxon.

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