An Investigation on the Tribological Performance of Carbon nanotube (CNT) as a Lubricant Additive to Locally Made Engine Oil

Lubricating oil is manufactured with the purpose to minimize friction and to control wear in machine elements such as gears, bearings, springs and beams. The components of machines nowadays become more complex in order to improve the production rate. These machines required lubricant for protection in order to avoid damages and giving stability in performance of machine. With the addition of additives to the lubricant, it makes the lifetime of the machine even longer. The additive would improve the performance of lubricating ability by enhancing the desirable tribology properties. This project is concerning on the usage of Carbon nanotube (CNT) as the potential additive to be added to the locally made lubricant i.e. MACH 5. The purpose of adding the CNT into the lubricant is to enhance the lubricant properties in terms of providing less friction for a sliding contact. Initially, this project starts with gathering information on internal combustion engine, lubricant and the additive candidate; CNT. For this project to prove that CNT might be the next candidate for lubricant additive, there will be two types of experiment to be conducted throughout this project i.e. viscosity test and four balls wear test. Viscosity test is to measures a lubricant's resistance to flow at certain temperature and is considered as oil's most important physical property. Fourball weartest on the other hand is the industry's standard test method for measuring the wearpreventive characteristics of a lubricant. The smaller the average wear scar, the better the protection provided by the lubricant. The wear scar surface resulted form the four ball wear test is later to be analyzed with the scanning electron microscope (SEM) machine. At the end of this project CNT is aimed as the solution that could provide less friction to the surface contact and capable to withstand extreme pressure