Using low viscosity engine oil is one of the most economical and easily achievable ways to improve fuel economy. Base oil is a main component in low viscosity engine oils, and therefore, the separation and identification of its are of great significance for oil product developers to prepare high-performance lubricants. However, the extraction methods reported for base oils mainly adopt membrane dialysis, which not only fails to completely separate the base oil but also wastes a large amount of solvent. The reason for this result is that the concentration of substances inside and outside the membrane cannot always be in an imbalanced state of permeation resulting from manual operation. Additionally, most studies primarily focus on the characterization of base oil components, while there are few reports on grade identification. For the above reasons, an economically effective separation technique of base oil from low viscosity gasoline engine oil SN 0W-16 is successfully established by combining improved Soxhlet extraction and a column chromatography separation method. By applying this method, the yield of extracting base oil generally exceeds 96%, and the solvent can also save more than 3 times. Besides, an exclusion method is built through several simple characterization steps including viscosity index (VI), FT-IR, size-exclusion chromatography (SEC), and hydrocarbon composition, which can quickly identify the American Petroleum Institute (API) grade and brand of the base oils.
© 2024 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.