Abstract:
Lubricants play a vital role in reducing the wear and tear of engine/gear box metal parts. Number of
analytical and spectroscopic methods have been used to analyze the quality of the lubricant oil.
Moreover some parameters such as Total Acid Number (TAN), viscosity index also have been used to
analyze the quality of the oil. Several used wind turbine gear oil samples were analyzed by various
spectroscopic methods such as UV-Visible, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) and Fluorescence
Spectroscopy. Fluorescence method gave promising results among those three spectroscopic methods.
In order to study thermal degradation, motor oil samples were subjected to artificial aging in the
laboratory conditions by heating them up to different temperatures for different time periods and then
subsequently analyzed with fluorescence spectroscopic method. Subsequently two used engine oil
samples from a same diesel engine vehicle were analyzed using fluorescence spectroscopic method.
Notable variation in fluorescence emission intensities was observed with oil aging. Intensity of the
fluorescence emission signal decrease with oil degradation. Therefore fluorescence spectroscopic
method can be used to predict the reusability of gear oils as well as to identify the oil degradation.
This method can be further extended to develop a novel potential sensor to detect the quality of oil in
various types of engines.
