Is the lighter and brighter the grease, the better the performance and quality?
October 13, 2021
Is the lighter and brighter the grease, the better the performance and quality? There is a friend who often uses color to distinguish between good and bad grease when he buys grease. Once when he was buying grease, he ran into a grease agent who recommended his grease to my friend, and his grease was blown away. My friend didn't believe it at first, but then the agent said that my grease is light and delicate in color, and it is definitely the best product among the good ones. Upon hearing this, my friend was a little shaken. Because he always heard people say that the lighter the grease color, the better, he believed it and bought the grease from this agent. As a result, I took it back and tried it. It was totally unusable and damaged my mechanical equipment. I contacted the agent again, but the phone couldn't get through. So, to buy grease, you must first understand some basic common sense of grease. Grease is composed of Base Oil, thickener, additives, etc. Base oil is divided into mineral oil and synthetic oil, each of which has different shades, ranging from colorless to black. There are many kinds of thickeners, such as lithium base, complex lithium base, calcium base, complex calcium base, etc., with different colors. Additives include anti-wear, anti-extreme pressure, waterproof, anti-rust, etc., solid and liquid, and their colors are also different. During the production process, due to the influence of the production process such as temperature deviation, the color of the grease will also have different shades. The factors that affect the color of grease are as follows: 1. The color of the base oil. Different crude oil producing areas and different refining technologies will cause differences in the color of the base oil. The color of the base oil itself is not a quality indicator, but in general, the base oil that has been deeply refined through hydrotreating will contain fewer impurities, and their color will be relatively lighter. 2. The color of the additive According to the lubrication protection needs of different equipment, such as gasoline engines, diesel engines, gearboxes, industrial hydraulic systems, etc., different lubricants should be added with different additives to achieve the best lubrication protection effect. For example, engine oils include viscosity index improvers, antioxidants, cleaning dispersants, antifoaming agents, rust inhibitors, antiwear agents, demulsifiers, and so on. All these additives have their own different colors. When continuous innovation or adjustment of additive formulations to maintain technological leadership, the color of lubricating oil will have different changes, darker or lighter, and cannot be generalized. When using a new technology additive formula, this formula is characterized by a darker color, so you may find that the color is darker than before. In fact it is better than before.
3. The color of special dyes Perhaps most of my friends don’t understand that sometimes a specific coloring agent is added to certain lubricating oils and greases to change their original color. The purpose of this is sometimes to serve as a warning to distinguish other lubricants, and sometimes to distinguish between different product lines, the coloring agent will not play any lubricating protection. Take our automatic Gear Oil for example, we dye it red to remind our users not to add it to the engine or gear box by mistake; we dye the C-stroke engine oil green to remind you not to add it to In a four-stroke engine, that would cause engine damage; we dyed Mobil Grease MP green and Mobil Grease XHP blue, basically to distinguish these two different product lines. To sum up, it is impossible to judge the change of the inner quality of the grease simply from the darker or lighter color change. Regular grease performance reference standards are based on softness, hardness, water resistance, extreme pressure resistance, anti-wear performance, and operating temperature range as the criteria for judgment and selection. If the performance of the grease meets the predetermined parameters, it is A qualified product. After reading this article, I believe you must know how to judge the quality of grease. The performance of the grease is not directly related to the color. A lighter color is not necessarily a good performance, and a darker color is not necessarily a poor performance. As a user of lubricating grease, generally do not have the conditions for performance analysis of grease. It is not advisable to judge the quality of grease by observing the color and other methods. Of course, if the user finds that the transparency of the grease is uneven, a large amount of layering, agglomeration, etc., it can also be roughly judged that the product has been contaminated or has expired.
