Most of the rolling element bearings are lubricated with Grease lubricant. Generally, the grease is expected to serve for life. The major causes of the bearing failure are due to the failure of the lubrication. The grease will experience creeping, oil permeation, oil separation etc. The separated oil will be lost permanently from the bearing. The widely used grease for general application is the lithium grease. The thickener of the grease consists covalent bond. When the grease is sheared, the breakage of the covalent bond will be permanent, resulting in the permanent loss of the rheological properties. The gels have unique properties such as thermal reversibility, viscoelasticity and thixotropy. They become mobile under shear stress and solidify again when the shear stress is removed. This property can be harnessed to avoid the base oil creeping, oil permeation, leakage in gears and bearings. Due to the presence of the polar group in the gels, they form a good tribo film and prevent the wear. Under the shear stress, weak supramolecular interactions will be distorted, and this leads to the release of the oil and they re-form the structure after a certain period of rest. When the gel is in the solid-state, it will avoid creeping and evaporation. Many classes of gels are either derived from natural sources or from environmentally friendly materials. Thus, the lubricant formed out of gel would effectively solve both environmental as well as lubrication problems. In this work, supramolecular gel lubricants were prepared out of fully green, cellulose derivatives and starch hydrolysates. The non-ionic hydroxyethyl cellulose (HEC) and anionic sodium carboxymethyl cellulose (NaCMC) were chosen to understand the effect of ionic and non-ionic gelators on the rheological and the tribological parameters. Traditionally fat was used as a lubricant, now, in food industry various fat replacers are being used. To study whether the fat replacers can act as a thickener, Dextrin and maltodextrins were chosen. Dextrin and maltodextrin with the different DE values were selected to understand the influence of molecular weight on gelation and tribological performance. Inspired by the recent developments and advantages of aqueous lubrication, mixer of water and poly(ethylene glycol) 200 (PEG 200) is chosen as the base fluid. It was found that a very small amount of gelator can increase the viscosity of the PEG/water to several orders. The thermal stability of the gels was studied using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and found that gels can increase the thermal stability of the base fluid. FTIR results showed the formation of a non-covalent bond between the PEG molecules and water. It is shown that anionic gelator will result in producing low friction and wear in comparison to non-ionic gelator. The possible tribo-film formation due to the negative charge in the NaCMC molecules is attributed to these results. The very low friction and low wear was exhibited by the dextrin and maltodextrin gels. It is proposed that this could be due to the microspherical particles of gels which can act as nano bearings. It was found that choosing the optimum concentration of the gelator is important to reduce friction and wear. The higher gelator concentration will form the hard gel, which cannot flow and replenish the sliding contact, resulting in the starved lubrication. This will cause high wear and friction. These gel lubricants can be used in food, pharmaceutical and biomedical industries.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:ltu-76007 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Shetty, Pramod |
| Publisher | Luleå tekniska universitet, Institutionen för teknikvetenskap och matematik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Thesis: Master of Science in Mechanichal Engineering, |
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