Tribological Evaluation of Vegetable oils as a Multi-cylinder Engine lubricant

Abstract: Lubricants are essential machine elements, which are important for efficient transportation, industrial production and contribute greatly to energy savings and the fuel economy. But continued increasing environmental concerns forced to increase the usage of vegetable oil utilization in lubricants for many applications. The vegetable oils offer significant environmental benefits because of its inherent qualities like renewability, bio degradability. Also, from India's point of view, India has a great potential of producing vegetable oil based lubricants. Because of these, suitability of vegetable oils i.e. cottonseed oil and soya bean oil is checked as a lubricant for multi-cylinder engine. Four ball testing machine is used for experimentation as per ASTM D 4172 standard. Finally it is observed that combination of SAE 20W40 oil +10% by vol. cottonseed oil+0.5% by wt graphite is the best suitable lubricant for multi-cylinder engine. Keywords: Lubricant, vegetable oil, cottonseed oil, soya bean oil, ASTM D 4172.