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Old 10-19-2011, 12:31 PM   #174 (permalink)
wstar
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Well, getting down to the nitty gritty, it comes down to this: the basic paper I linked earlier says their testing was on a PAO-based oil that used 1% of an ester called "glycerol mono-oleate" to get their lowest frictions w/ the DLC coating. Quality ester-based synthetics like redline/motul have largely mysterious makeups, but best guesses are anywhere from 20-40% of some sort of esters in e.g. Motul 300V. Motul says they use two different esters in their oils, but they don't state which ones. You can get MSDS for the oil, and MSDS for the glycerol mono-oleate, but seeing as the glycerol mono-oleate isn't dangerous, it's not listed on the MSDS for the oil whether it's there or not.

So, barring someone doing expensive testing or getting Motul or Redline to provide a straight answer on whether 1%+ of that specific ester is in their oil, we're in unknown territory going by the specs. Still, I'd place good money if they got their awesome friction numbers on a generic PAO + 1% of this specific ester, that a quality racing oil known to be 20%+ of at least two kinds of unknown esters, that Nissan even uses in its own race cars (the 300V), probably achieves the same effect. Doubtless several other quality synthetics do too.

The big practical flaw in the PDF report is that they showed comparison of DLC + their PAO +1% glycerol mono-oleate versus a reference of just plain old motor oil. It would have been nice to compare it to well-engineered ester based oils already on the market...
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