Envir­on­ment­ally friendly lub­ric­ant addit­ives from renew­able raw materials

München, 19.02.2020 (Presse­Box) — In the ​“PHAt” pro­ject, the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and Research has been fund­ing a con­sor­ti­um of four part­ners with around 1.25 mil­lion euros since Octo­ber 2017. The experts from industry and sci­ence are devel­op­ing sus­tain­able thicken­ers and bind­ers for the lub­ric­ant industry using bio-based raw mater­i­als from microor­gan­isms. Arriv­ing in the final year of the pro­ject, sev­er­al applic­a­tion tests already reveal con­sid­er­able results.

Lub­ric­ants are used to reduce fric­tion and wear in machines. They can also con­trib­ute to cool­ing, are used as seal­ants or pro­tect against cor­ro­sion. Sol­id film lub­ric­ants are also used in a wide vari­ety of applic­a­tions, for example in screw con­nec­tions, seat belt buckles or hinges, but also on door pan­els, cov­er pan­els or leath­er seats in cars to pre­vent noise such as squeak­ing and creak­ing dur­ing driv­ing. The spe­cial prop­erty of sol­id film lub­ric­ants is that they form a thin, dry slid­ing lay­er that reduces fric­tion and wear on abut­ting sur­faces. To ensure that lub­ric­ants in gen­er­al provide optim­um per­form­ance in a wide range of applic­a­tions, addit­ives such as thicken­ers or bind­ers are added to them. How­ever, these are still usu­ally petroleum-based.

The part­ners in the ​“PHAt” pro­ject are devel­op­ing envir­on­ment­ally com­pat­ible thicken­ers and bind­ers based on a sub­stance class of nat­ur­ally occur­ring biopoly­mers, so-called poly­hy­droxyalkanoates (PHA). The PHA ori­gin­ate from spe­cial microor­gan­isms that pro­duce these molecules as stor­age mater­i­al. After many optim­iz­a­tion steps in PHA pro­duc­tion, the pro­ject part­ners have now reached the threshold of semi-indus­tri­al scale pro­duc­tion, which in the fore­see­able future might even be eco­nom­ic­ally feas­ible. In a sub­sequent step, the PHAs will be chem­ic­ally mod­i­fied in order to vary and optim­ize their prop­er­ties. In sev­er­al applic­a­tion tests, the pro­ject part­ners have now shown that the mod­i­fied PHA have a good thick­en­ing and cross­link­ing effect.

Pro­ject coordin­at­or Dr. Inna Bretz from Fraunhofer UMSICHT explains: ​“Since the res­ults are quite pos­it­ive, we are already plan­ning to con­tin­ue our cooper­a­tion after the end of the fund­ing period”.

In addi­tion to the research insti­tute Fraunhofer UMSICHT, Fritzmei­er Umwelt­tech­nik GmbH & CO. KG per­forms the bio­tech­no­lo­gic­al pro­duc­tion of PHA and Unaver­a­Chem­Lab GmbH runs the chem­ic­al PHA modi­fic­a­tion. The major com­pany FUCHS Schmi­er­stoffe GmbH is test­ing, in cooper­a­tion with FUCHS LUB­RITECH GmbH, the applic­a­tion of the new thicken­ers and bind­ers in lub­ric­ants and bon­ded coat­ings and intends to even­tu­ally mar­ket them.

The pro­ject will be presen­ted at the Bio­l­ubric­ant Con­fer­ence of the Facha­gen­tur Nachwach­sende Rohstoffe e.V. in Braun­sch­weig on 17^th and 18^th June 2020. The pro­ject part­ners receive fund­ing of approx­im­ately 1.25 mil­lion euros for three years from the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and Research as part of the ​“Tail­or-made biobased ingredi­ents for a com­pet­it­ive bio-eco­nomy” fund­ing meas­ure. The pro­ject was ini­ti­ated with­in the ​“BioPlastik” cooper­a­tion net­work, which is man­aged by IBB Net­zwerk GmbH.

Pro­ject web­site: www​.phat​-pro​jekt​.de