Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Owing to the drive for more fuel-efficient, lighter, and smaller engines with longer lifetime for modern automobiles and machines that can operate in extreme conditions, engine lubricants have to meet increasingly stringent requirements to match the high demands and to offer tangible performance and economic benefits. Synthetic lubricants, formulated from synthetic base stocks of uniform and well-defined molecular structures, have shown outstanding performance advantages compared to conventional lubricants based on mineral base oils from petroleum, which have undesired complex compositions and broad distributed performance properties. Owing to the severe competition from other base stocks and increasing market demands on lubricant performance, the synthetic lubricant industry is driven to develop and market next-generation, high-performance synthetic base stock technologies to remain competitive in the global market. In collaboration with the supporting company, Imperial Oil Ltd., this project is aimed at developing a new synthetic lubricant base stock technology based on molecularly-engineered low-molecular-weight dendritic polyethylenes. Chain walking ethylene polymerization techniques with the use of late-transition-metal Pd-diimine catalysts will be developed and employed for tailor synthesis of this novel range of base stocks of uniform and well-defined polymer molecular structures and performance properties. The unique compact dendritic polymer chain architecture is expected to impart these base stocks with superior viscosity/rheological properties, and render them highly promising for application as new high-performance synthetic base stocks. If successful, the base stock technology to be developed in this project may have great potential for applications in Canada's strategically important oil/lubricant industry. The fundamental knowledge to be generated in this project is also believed to provide the industry a key to newer and better synthetic base stock technologies. In addition, this industry-relevant research will also provide excellent training opportunities to our students and research fellows, who constitute the nation's future high-tech workforce.