Posts Tagged ‘motor oil distributor colorado’

Interesting article by John R. Quain regarding a Roadside Assistance application created by Mazda.  The application was created for iPhone users.  Thanks for sharing this John!

April 7, 2010, 7:30 am Roadside Assistance in an App, From Mazda

Take that, OnStar.

Mazda joins a growing number of automakers capitalizing on the popularity of the iPhone to offer apps that cover free navigation, remote unlocking and roadside assistance. Mercedes will let you lock or unlock your car from an iPhone. Smart will soon let you play Internet radio stations and receive turn-by-turn directions from an iPhone app. Now, Mazda is introducing an app for roadside assistance.

Mazda’s Roadside Assistance iPhone app.

The Mazda Roadside Assistance App is complimentary along with the free roadside assistance provided under the warranty period (36 months or 36,000 miles). Drivers enter basic information, like the car’s vehicle identification number. Should the unforeseen then occur, like a flat tire, dead battery or accident, the owner can contact the closest service provider (via Cross Country Automotive Services) by tapping on the application’s icon.

The software will prompt the driver to make sure he or she has pulled off to a safe area or to dial an emergency number if not. Owners can also enter information to specify the problem, and Mazda’s call center will dispatch assistance. While you’re waiting for the tow truck, the app will periodically give you an estimate as to when help will arrive (so you can go back to posting on Twitter).

The primary benefit of the Mazda application is that it will find your location automatically. In other words, a tow truck can find you without having to rely on vague instructions like, “I just passed Exit 15 on I-95.”

Unlike the 911 service in Ford’s Sync or GM’s OnStar, calls are not made automatically when, say, a car’s air bags are deployed. The Mazda app cannot be operated via voice commands, either, should you be in real trouble. And the application lacks other features of, say, Smart’s coming application. There’s no turn-by-turn navigation, for example, or Bluetooth Internet radio function. Blackberry owners and Android phone users are also out of luck: the Mazda application works with only the iPhone 3G and 3GS models.

Still, Mazda’s app illustrates how smartphones are gaining a foothold in the car, becoming the new accessory to gain entry into services that previously required a monthly subscription and expensive built-in hardware.

About Pynergy Petroleum Company

Pynergy Petroleum Company was founded in August 1999 when it acquired three Conoco Branded retail locations in the Denver, CO area.  Since then, Pynergy has been devoted to providing high quality fuels, lubricants, diesel exhaust fluid, equipment and service to the automotive, heavy duty and industrial markets.  Please visit us at www.pynergypetroleum.com

Watch a recap of the Nashville 300 including Kevin Harvick’s second NNS win of the season.

About Pynergy Petroleum Company

Pynergy Petroleum Company was founded in August 1999 when it acquired three Conoco Branded retail locations in the Denver, CO area.  Since then, Pynergy has been devoted to providing high quality fuels, lubricants, diesel exhaust fluid, equipment and service to the automotive, heavy duty and industrial markets.  Please visit us at www.pynergypetroleum.com

This is a nice little article by Jeremy Korzeniewski on the new 2011 GMC Sierra HD and its usage of Diesel Exhaust Fluid.

2011 GMC Sierra HD features unique diesel exhaust fluid refill reminders

by Jeremy Korzeniewski on Mar 11th 2010 at 8:59AM

2011 GMC Sierra Denali HD – Click above for high-res image gallery

Say it with us: 397 horsepower and 765 pound-feet of torque. That’s what General Motors has been able to extract from its new B20-capable 6.6-liter Duramax V8 diesel engine in the GMC Sierra HD and Chevrolet Silverado HD, which is mated up to a stout Allison 1000 six-speed automatic transmission. For those who like to keep track of these things, which is to say every single personwho’s actually interested in purchasing one of these earth-moving behemoths, GM’s latest Duramax beats out the 2011 Ford Super Duty in the all-important horsepower and torque wars.

That massively powerful powerplant is also more fuel efficient (by 11 percent, though GM isn’t quoting actual numbers just yet) and cleaner than the unit it replaces. Each of these benchmarks has something to do with the exhaust aftertreatment systems employed on the Heavy Duty. GM tells us that the new 2011 truck cycles through its DPF filter cleaning process significantly less often than the unit it replaces, which saves a good amount of fuel.

Interestingly, GM representatives also tell us that they had a bit of a back-and-forth with the Feds regarding how best to handle the required refilling of the diesel exhaust fluid tank, which won’t run dry until about 5,000 miles. It seems that when the truck gets dangerously low on the exhaust treatment, its speed will be capped at 55 miles per hour. If you run out, the computer nannies will keep you to just a four mph crawl so that you’ll never be stranded completely.

A recap of the race including a dominant showing by Kurt Busch, a wreck involving Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson’s 50th career win.

About Pynergy Petroleum Company

Pynergy Petroleum Company was founded in August 1999 when it acquired three Conoco Branded retail locations in the Denver, CO area.  Since then, Pynergy has been devoted to providing high quality fuels, lubricants, diesel exhaust fluid, equipment and service to the automotive, heavy duty and industrial markets.  Please visit us at www.pynergypetroleum.com

Trouble-Shooting Viscosity Excursions

By: Jim Fitch 

When an oil’s viscosity makes a significant change it is meaningful. The majority of the characteristics associated with wrong, contaminated or degraded lubricants will cause a change in viscosity. Restated, when trending the viscosity of a used oil and no reportable change occurs, one can conclude that many of the things that could be happening to the oil are not yet occurring. These include oxidation, shear thinning, thermal degradation and many other common condemning conditions.

The signs of viscosity change are numerous. For many organizations, improperly diagnosed causes lead to problem reoccurrence (from the same cause) with each oil change. This occurs when oil labs see a change in viscosity and only recommend the oil compartment be drained and the lubricant replaced.

This article was written to provide an organized listing of common and not-so-common reasons for nonconforming lubricant viscosity. The varying applications of lubricants are so extensive and records of viscosity failures of in-service lubricants so incomplete, it is likely that many conditions responsible for viscosity extrusions have been overlooked here. The author would appreciate suggestions and comments from readers on any known causes of lubricant viscosity change not covered in this article.

How Viscosity Changes
Think of an oil’s molecules as a large basket of mixed whole fruit. When you tip the basket, the fruit becomes a fluid body and flows out of the basket. In the basket there are cherries, plums, lemons, apples, grapefruit and melons. The fruit are different sizes and weights just like the molecules of common mineral oil. When crude oil is refined, the molecules are separated by their molecular weight into broad groups (small, medium and large for instance). An oil’s viscosity basically correlates to the average size of the molecules of a given oil, i.e., small molecules are associated with low viscosity (thin oil) and large molecules with high viscosity (thick oil).

To change the viscosity, the average size of the molecules needs to change. Most mineral oils of a particular viscosity have molecules of an assortment of sizes. However, if the oil viscosity is high, the predominant size is large. The opposite is true for a low viscosity oil. Going back to the fruit analogy, the viscosity of the basket of assorted fruit would change if all the cherries were removed. This would increase the average size of the fruit and the viscosity. In the case of a lubricant, hot-running oil can boil off small molecules, creating the same effect.

To decrease the viscosity, the melons could be quartered to make them smaller. With oil, molecules can “cleave” or crack into pieces when they are exposed to extremely high temperatures. Another way to reduce the viscosity of the fruit basket would be to add more cherries, lemons and plums to the mix. This is similar to adding a low viscosity oil to a higher viscosity oil. The blended viscosity is somewhere in between the two. This type of thinning also occurs when a motor oil is contaminated with fuel.

The following summarizes how viscosity can change using our fruit basket analogy:

Decrease Viscosity:
1. Add more small fruit (mixing fuel with oil).

2. Remove some of the large fruit (electrostatic removal of oxide insolubles).

3. Cut the larger fruit into smaller pieces (shear thinning of VI improvers and lubricant cracking).

Increase Viscosity:
1. Add more large fruit (adding a more viscous make-up oil).

2. Remove some of the small fruit (boiling off light hydrocarbon fractions).

3. Glue several small fruit into a large poly-fruit cluster (oxidation, polymerization, etc.).

Zero-sum Viscosity Effects (two simultaneous offsetting events):
1. Small fruit and large fruit are added at the same time (when motor oil is contaminated with both fuel and soot, the fuel decreases the viscosity and the soot increases it.).

2. Cleave (cut into pieces) large fruit and remove small fruit at the same time (high temperatures thermally crack oil molecules to evolve gas that evaporates out of the oil).

Side Bar – What Causes Viscosity to Change (Click Here)

Early Detection, Key to Health Management
In some cases, slight viscosity changes are normal; for instance, the minor shear thinning of VI improvers of an all-season hydraulic fluid. However, in other cases, an oil’s change in viscosity might be the first indication of a more serious problem. For example, when an oil loses its oxidation stability the viscosity will trend upward. If the problem is not recognized and corrected, an innocuous five percent uptick in viscosity soon becomes a 50 percent uptick, rapidly increasing to 500 percent. In such cases, the worse things get, the faster they worsen. So early detection is the strategic imperative.

There are two important strategies one should apply. The first is to set a proper baseline (don’t use published “product typicals”). Because the viscosity of a new oil can vary as much as 20 percent and stay within its designated ISO Viscosity Grade, the actual starting viscosity must be measured and recorded. After all, it would be rather difficult to pick up a 10 percent shift in the viscosity of an in-service used oil if the correct starting viscosity is unknown and assumed to be somewhere in the 20-percent range. It is better to measure the new lubricant’s viscosity in the same way you are planning to monitor the used oil’s viscosity, with the same instruments, same temperature, same procedure, etc. Because some lubricants are blends of fluids from different batches, sometimes progressively mixed new and used oils in a large reservoir, the “blended” starting viscosity is best set as the baseline, as opposed to the viscosity of any single batch of new oil.

Once a lubricant has been baselined, set limits. Many oil analysis software products will do this automatically. Because both southward and northward viscosity excursions are worthy of concern, limits in both directions must be set. This, in effect, puts a “band” or “envelope” around the oil’s baseline viscosity. If the viscosity should trend higher or lower by significant measure, a limit is breached and the condition is flagged or alarmed.

Most top-shelf oil analysis programs apply tight limits above and below viscosity baselines. For crankcase oils, viscosity is typically measured at 100°C (212°F) while nearly all other lubricants are tracked at 40°C (104°F). If a reliable viscosity baseline is in place, it is recommended that cautionary and critical limits be set.

Figure 1 suggests some limits conventionally used for both crankcase and industrial lubricants. Once the baseline and limits are in place, data from used oil analysis becomes easier to understand. Refer to the troubleshooting chart in Figure 2 as a guide on how to interpret nonconforming viscosity data.

Impact of Specific Gravity on Viscosity
Most commercial oil analysis laboratories deploy the use of kinematic viscosity using gravity flow capillary viscometers according to ASTM D445 (IP 71S1/97). One well-known limitation or interference relating to kinematic viscosity measurement occurs when an oil’s specific gravity changes. Typically it increases as the oil ages or becomes contaminated. This can occur at the same time viscosity changes or it can occur independent of viscosity.

If specific gravity increases without a change in absolute viscosity (the oil’s resistance to flow or shear) there will be a decrease in kinematic viscosity proportional to the change in specific gravity. While not a true viscosity change, it has the potential to be misrepresented as such. Examples of how specific gravity can increase viscosity include contamination (heavy solid and liquids), oxidation, evaporative losses, wear debris, glycol contamination, etc.

In many cases, when an oil’s specific gravity increases there is also an increase in absolute viscosity. The resulting effect is an understatement of the reported increase in kinematic viscosity.

Getting the Most from Viscosity Monitoring
Adding routine viscosity analysis to a lubricant condition-monitoring program makes good strategic sense. From the many different conditions that influence lubricant viscosity, as listed on the previous page, a lack of viscosity change is comforting indeed. For this reason, many reliability programs add viscosity analysis onsite and check critical lubricants and hydraulic fluids regularly.

When nonconforming viscosity trends occur, best practice is to determine the root cause of the excursion so that it can be prevented from reoccurring. This is particularly true in cases where viscosity changes early in a lubricant’s life and/or when large shifts in viscosity are observed.

Finally, as with most oil analysis instruments and maintenance technologies, viscosity analysis alone does not provide a complete picture of everything that is happening to the oil and to the machine. Other tools and methods are equally important in deploying your condition-monitoring arsenal.