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A field study was conducted to determine the impact of engine age, engine oil age, drain interval, and engine oil formulation on vehicle tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency. FTP/HFET emissions and Fuel economy testing was conducted on Ford Vans powered by Ford V10 6.8 Litre gasoline engines at the start of the drain period, mid-way through the drain period and at the end of the drain period. This work was conducted with approximately 50,000 miles on the engine and then repeated at 100,000 miles. It was found that engine age, oil age and drain interval influenced emissions and fuel efficiency. These influences are discussed.

The impact of viscosity grade and base fluid composition on fuel economy and emission levels has been investigated. A synthetic 5W40 HDDO formulation exhibits promise to address these two needs. The fuel economy and the emission levels were measured at different temperatures in a vehicle dynamometer using Dodge pick-up trucks equipped with Cummins ISB engines. A significant improvement in the fuel economy along with improvements in emissions over a conventional 15W40 product was demonstrated. The oil was also shown to have good wear performance in a 5.9L B engine six cycle cam wear test. In addition, the oil meets all the requirements of the latest API CI-4 specification as well as all OEM specifications.

Automatic equipment based on optical detection has been used for petroleum products successfully. Examples include ASTM D5773 Standard Test Method for Cloud Point Determination of Petroleum Products and ASTM D5972 Standard Test Method for the Freezing Point of Aviation Fuels. Recently it has been shown that the technology can be extended to engine coolants1. The determination of freezing point in aqueous ethylene glycol based systems is imperfectly understood and complicated by non-equilibrium solidification. The current ASTM D 1177-94 method includes manual seeding to overcome this but requires a cryogenic bath, time and considerable operator skill. Experimentally determined aqueous ethylene glycol freezing points show good agreement between laboratories only to approximately 60 wt %. In the 58 wt % to 80 wt % region, one, two and even three eutectics have been reported at varying temperatures.