Viscosity Index Enhancement Through Dumb-Bell Blending of Lubricants

Viscosity index is an arbitray number used to characterize the variation of lubricant viscosity with respect to temperature. It is well recognized in the oil industry that as refining severity increases, lubricant VI increases. Consequently, VI is often perceived as a measure of lubricant quality. Futhermore, a 95 VI minimum specification is commonly imposed in marketing base stocks. These factors provide the incentitive for this study to carefully analyze VI definition and two component viscosity blending techniques to investigate how they affect VI change, and finally to examine possible avenues to produce 95+VI base stocks by blending sub-95 VI base stocks.