2024-08-30 09:45:13
Conventional lubricants are usually made from petroleum products and non-biodegradable thickeners or additives, so they can be harmful to the environment. This raises the need to look for alternatives made with other renewable and biodegradable products, so that they retain their functionality, but with less impact.
With this in mind, a team from the Technology Center for Chemical Products and Processes (Pro2TecS), attached to the University of Huelva in Spain, developed a product for lubrication applications consisting of wheat cellulose paste and castor oil, from agricultural waste. Manuel Trejo Cáceres, María Carmen Sánchez and José Enrique Martín Alfonso have confirmed that this waste can be used as a thickener or additive for oils and bitumen, as an alternative to the traditional ones. The resulting products are less toxic and less harmful to the environment than those commonly used in the industrial sector. Similarly, they recommend a mixture used for paving areas such as roads, made with the same agricultural waste. In this way, they get more sustainable products than the usual ones.
“Our objective was to propose an alternative that would benefit from and reuse agricultural waste, in accordance with the new industrial policy of Andalusia, according to the principles of the circular economy model ‘less raw materials, less waste, less emissions ,’ he said. explains to the Discover Foundation the professor in the field of Materials Science at the University of Huelva José Enrique Martín.
To obtain cellulose pulp from straw and wheat waste, the researchers used Kraft’s chemical process, which involves applying caustic soda to the waste and heating it until its fibers become a semi-solid paste. This process is used, for example, to make paper.
Using this paste, the scientific team conducted an exhaustive study of the main variables that affect its chemical modification: temperature, reaction time and the relationship between reactions. As in the testing of cooking recipes, this helped them to check how much heat should be applied, the time it took to take effect and how the properties of the final product changed when mixed them with the fluids.
In this way, over a period of one year of experiments they obtained a range of different pastas with different chemical modifications and were able to check which ‘recipe’ worked best and what each one was for.
A dispersion formulated with modified wheat cellulose pulp and castor oil suitable for lubricating applications. (Photo: University of Huelva / Discover Foundation)
Experts add that the modified paste can be used as a thickener or additive to develop a lubricating or binding grease. “Under normal circumstances, these substances would not mix well. What we have done is to improve its chemical compatibility so that the mixture is more stable and homogeneous, also providing other functional properties,” says Manuel Trejo, researcher of the University of Huelva.
The title of the study is “Evaluation of the acetylation process of wheat straw pulp as a sustainable rheological modifier for non-polar fluids.” And it is published in the academic journal Cellulose.
The next step for the researchers from the Pro2tecs group is to improve the functional properties of the pasta, by modifying their physical properties and by adding other chemical groups that give new products with improved properties. (Source: Discover Foundation)
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