Condition monitoring of lubricating oils in diesel engines

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Our industrial partner, Gastops Ltd, is a Canadian world leader in condition monitoring of rotating machinery. In collaboration with Carleton University, the company is now studying physical and chemical mechanisms of degradation in lubricants, potentially enabling developments of technologies for real-time condition monitoring using on-line sensors capable of predicting the remaining useful life of a lubricating oil. This research requires two fundamental scientific contributions. The first is a means to calibrate and characterize the signals that an on-line sensor will produce. This entails careful, controlled oil degradation experiments and accurate characterizations of the resulting by-products using well-established lab-based tools. The second requirement is accurate modeling of the oil degradation processes. Once the sensor is calibrated to accurately identify the types and concentrations of key degradation by-products, it can only predict the remaining useful life of lubricating oil if a model exists to extrapolate lubricating oil conditions based on the current state of the oil and the expected operating conditions of the machinery. Our combined theoretical, computational and experimental approach will lead to the development of a chemical kinetics model with this predictive capability.