Thermal characterization of jatropha-oil blends in the 20-55°C temperature range and tribological study

The increasing need for sustainable industrial supplies makes the use of vegetable oil additives a viable option for making industries more environmentally friendly. In this sense, the use of vegetable-based oils can reduce the friction coefficient of oil, decrease wear rates over working temperature ranges, and decrease environmental impact by extending equipment lifetime and potentially reducing the need for oil changes. In this work, motor oil-Jatropha blends at different ratios (97:3, 95:5, 92:8, and 90:10) were investigated for their thermal properties as a function of temperature, and a tribological characterization was performed to obtain the friction coefficients from each motor-Jatropha oil blend. Within the studied temperature range, the results indicate that it is possible to modify the thermal properties or even the friction coefficient by adjusting the mixture ratio. In this work, a further investigation on refined Jatropha as a lubricant oil additive is presented, adding the variation of thermal properties in the temperature range of 20 − 55◦C.