The Shell Technology Center: Unveiling the Science and Technology Behind Fuels and Oils

As we step into the Shell Technology Center, we find ourselves surrounded by innovative machinery and cutting-edge technology that has revolutionized the way fuels and oils are developed. The center is a hub of activity, with various machines and devices at work, each playing a crucial role in understanding the complex science behind engine performance. One of the most fascinating devices on display is a machine used to analyze the wear from cold starting an engine. This machine simulates the cold start on an engine, specifically designed for the Tu3 Peugeot engine, allowing us to study the wear between the camshaft and followers.

The machine's design is quite impressive, with a metal piece shell that protects it from damage. The device also features a machine used to humidify the chamber inside the block, simulating the first part of the test. This innovative technology has been proven to show the most amount of wear, providing valuable insights into engine performance. After completing the initial phase, the machine transitions into a hotter phase at 100 degrees Celsius, simulating the engine's heated state. The device then runs for an additional time, allowing us to analyze the volume and depth of the peaks and valleys.

To demonstrate this technology in action, we turn on the machine, which makes a slight noise as it begins to operate. We start off at a low speed to observe the movement, watching as the top arm slides back and forth and the disc at the bottom rolls. The machine's purpose is to create a protective barrier between metals by pulling oil out from the bath at the bottom and throwing it onto the wheel, where it's coated on the piston. This film acts as a sacrificial barrier, allowing for metal-to-metal contact whenever it's needed.

As we continue to observe the machine in action, we notice that the speed increases, demonstrating the device's ability to simulate various engine conditions. We also get a glimpse of the film forming between the two components, which is crucial in understanding how oils interact with engines. The Shell Technology Center has collaborated with OEMs to develop different types of metallurgy and test various loads, making it an essential resource for fuel and oil development.

Another critical component of the center is the Clean Machine, designed to determine and analyze the cleanliness of pistons after extended use in an engine. This machine uses various oils and can analyze them together simultaneously, allowing researchers to screen multiple formulations at once. The sequence 3G test ranks pistons on a scale from 1 to 10, with one being extremely dirty and 10 being perfectly clean.

The Clean Machine works by using mini pistons made from glass tubes that match the behavior of actual engine pistons. As these tiny pistons rotate, we can observe real-time deposit formation, providing valuable insights into the fundamental science behind engine cleanliness. The machine allows researchers to analyze 12 different formulations at a time, making it an essential tool in developing cleaner and more efficient fuels.

The team behind this innovative technology includes scientist Bob De Cracker, who suggested simplifying the rig by having oil suck up into the piston to simulate the motion of pistons going up and down. This modification enables us to observe the oil coating the piston every minute for a set amount of time before coming back down. To further challenge the machine's capabilities, 50 new formulations are used alongside 50 traditional use taxi oils, pushing the limits of what we can expect from these fuels.

In conclusion, the Shell Technology Center is a hub of innovation and scientific inquiry, where researchers work tirelessly to develop more efficient and cleaner fuels and oils. The machines on display demonstrate cutting-edge technology that has revolutionized our understanding of engine performance and cleanliness. By delving deeper into this world, we gain insight into the complex science behind engine maintenance and development, ultimately leading to improved fuel efficiency and reduced emissions.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be taking a behind-the-scenes look at the shell technology center and looking at some of the science and engineering that goes into the development of different fuels and oils as you can see there's a few special guests that were invited to this on the left we've got humble mechanic and of course to the right we've got scotty kilmer and eric the car guy so it was pretty awesome to meet these guys and experience this with them one of our first stops on the tour we had a quick demonstration of a dirty valve versus a clean valve see how the one with deposits continues to burn a heck of a lot longer than the other one i don't think that's how an engine's supposed to work and of course the idea is there's fuel absorbed into that that three-dimensional structure and it and it burns and you can see it one of our next stops was the gas chromatography lab so before we get started and listen to the experts uh on gas chromatography let's just talk a little bit about what it is so gas chromatography is basically trying to find out all the different molecules the chemical composition that make up a liquid in this case fuel so how this works is you have a carrier gas and the purpose of the carrier gas is to carry the fuel that you're using through the columns so what we've got here is carrier gas a flow controller you're going to be injecting fuel into this uh column oven and there's a column inside of here which you're injecting the fuel through along with the carrier gas and that fuel mixture with carrier gas is going to travel through this column so i've got an image here where you can see uh what an actual column looks like and so as that those gases are moving through this column the different molecules move at different rates so because they move at different rates they exit at different times so this detector can detect what's coming out uh individually as those different molecules move through and then you can record all of the different molecules that come out and the different quantities of each molecule and get a chemical composition of the gas that you're looking at so it's it's like distillation taken to the extreme so basically samples injected into the instrument it travels through this column separated out into all of its component parts and each one of those is detected and then the detection detector sends that information to the computer which integrates all those peaks enables us to calculate the composition of that material in in a great deal of detail these are actually chromatograms this one of a motorsport fuel and this one of a normal road fuel and you can see there's some differences there particularly in the light cup um there's the number of uh pentana butane isomers in there giving more power to the motorsport fuel um a lot more combustion efficiency so this is this is where we're working out how the fuel is going to perform what we can answer what we can take away from it one thing about formula one fuel i mean maybe dave you can i don't know whether you can say a little bit more about this um the formula one fuel has to be substantially similar to conventional rolled road fuels we're working on 98 98 the same components yeah so we've only got a very very small margin about one percent to play with in terms of adding things to race fuels that wouldn't be in conventional gasoline now um however within that you know within conventional gasoline you've seen these are very complex mixtures there's a lot of components in there when we looked at the the difference between a conventional role fuel and formula one fuel we might find that we blend more volatile components into a formula one fuel to give it a boost in in that way you can play with density i think the formula is higher so higher octane so looking for um basically refinery components which go into conventional fuels that are high in the com in the uh the chemicals that are needed to give octane blending more of those within into the fuel within the properties envelope that we've got so you like i say you can you can shift density so that you can produce a fuel which they can get more fuel in the tank and run for longer or you can put more power into the fuel by enhancing octane or go for a more dense fuel with more power in it so there's lots of tricks that you can play depending on what the race strategy is next let's check out how shell measures engine wear and the effectiveness of different oils now we have to start looking at wear conditions so in the engine obviously a lot of moving parts some severe operation where you have high pressures high speeds these can take a toll on metal to metal contact that can occur now that's uh something that we want to prevent of course in the field but how do we understand that without doing a lot of engine testing uh doing a lot of field trials a lot spending a lot of money well what we've been able to do is take the portions of the engine that we know have the highest stresses the highest contact conditions and isolate them in a laboratory rig that that particularly uh emphasizes those particular conditions so that we get a good picture of the wear that occurs in the engine with our formulations now with that being said as i also mentioned this is a one-of-a-kind test rig so only shell has the opportunity to evaluate that sort of wear without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on expensive engine testing and field trials so when these are up and running it actually mimics the exact same conditions where you have that really severe contact and it's a 15 hour test so 15 hours of almost continuous metal and metal contact we can formulate lubricants that provide a protective film that protects and almost eliminate wear in those conditions so matt if you want to say anything else about the rigs or so basically these two rigs here are our heavy-duty uh diesel engine um brakes they mimic the cross-head wear on m11 cummins diesel engines uh scott said very very good tool for screening oils so we actually saved a lot of money uh in some very expensive engine testing by by running these through um basically this runs at about 600 newtons of force coming down onto the cross head itself and it uh reciprocates uh back and forth at about 20 hertz at 115 degrees c for as scott said 15 hours at the end of the test we pull the cross heads which at the end of the day this is what we're looking for is the scarring that occurs on these so in that arm it's reciprocating back and forth so as it comes to the beginning of the stroke and to the end of the stroke the oil film falls off so we have a little bit more contact there now across the middle here as it's coming across we can see that we've had quite a bit of oil formation to protect this metal piece shell also has a machine used to analyze the wear from cold starting an engine basically what we're able to do is simulate the cold start on on an engine this one is designed specifically for the tu3 peugeot engine and it simulates the wear between the camshaft and the followers so we are actually able to humidify this uh this block on the inside of here this chamber for the first part of the test and simulate the cold start of the engine which actually has been proven to show the most amount of wear so after that we run a second phase which is a hotter phase at a 100 degrees c which simulates after your engine is basically heated up we run it for an additional time and then pull it out and and kind of do the same thing where we run it on the profilometer get all the peaks and valleys and uh calculate volume and depth so i'm going to go ahead and turn this on for you it's going to make a little bit of noise here so don't be alarmed i'm going to start off at a low speed just so you can see the movement so as you can see this is a rolling and sliding rig the top arm is actually sliding back and forth and the disc at the bottom is rolling what it's doing is it's pulling oil out from that bath at the bottom and getting it onto the wheel and throwing it up into the sliding portion on the top so it's actually making a film in the in between which is creating a protective barrier between the metals so you have that metal on metal contact whenever this film is thrown up there it's like a sacrificial barrier between the two so i'm gonna amp this up a little bit and we're gonna see the speed that it actually runs back and if you look down and get you pretty much have to get about eye level with it you can actually see the film that's being formed in between the two components and we do a lot of collaborations with oems where they'll supply us with different types of metallurgy and we can test differences of metallurgy different loads all sorts of different things to mimic what's going finally we'll be checking out the clean machine and the clean machine is used to determine and analyze the cleanliness of pistons after extended use in an engine and the cool thing about this machine is you can use various different oils and analyze them together at the same time and so the sequence 3g test which is a very important test it ranks pistons on a scale from 1 to 10 with one being extremely dirty and 10 being perfectly clean this is what we want and what we've been able to do is turn these little glass tubes into mini pistons that match with what's happening in the engine and so what that does is it allows us using this rig the clean machine to be able to screen as you can see 12 different formulations at a time and then measure the deposit formation in real time so we start out with a tube that looks like this and over the time that it's running you can actually watch the deposits coming on and that helps us to understand the fundamental science behind what causes the engine to get dirty this machine is enabling us to look at the next generation of formulations so that we can continue to have products that are even cleaner and cleaner that will help with performance what are we seeing when this is moving so what happens when this moves is that when we were designing this we had a whole bunch of different prototypes and we had pistons that were going down and pistons that were going up and bob de cracker who is a scientist in our group was brilliant and he said well couldn't we make the rig simpler if we just had the oil suck up into the piston so to simulate the idea of the piston going up and down we have the oil coming up and coating the piston every minute for a set amount of time and then coming back down and that as you can see it's hard to see it from here but you can see the oil being sucked up and and coating the piston now one thing that we do to make this test even more challenging is that we put 50 of the new formulation and 50 use taxi oil and the reason to put in the use taxi oil is to really try and push it to the limit so that we can be able to differentiate um molecules that are going to really help us to stay clean now really this is just a small glimpse into some of the things that go on at the shell technology center but hopefully this provides a little insight into the science and technology that goes into the fuels and oils that you're putting into your cars so if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be taking a behind-the-scenes look at the shell technology center and looking at some of the science and engineering that goes into the development of different fuels and oils as you can see there's a few special guests that were invited to this on the left we've got humble mechanic and of course to the right we've got scotty kilmer and eric the car guy so it was pretty awesome to meet these guys and experience this with them one of our first stops on the tour we had a quick demonstration of a dirty valve versus a clean valve see how the one with deposits continues to burn a heck of a lot longer than the other one i don't think that's how an engine's supposed to work and of course the idea is there's fuel absorbed into that that three-dimensional structure and it and it burns and you can see it one of our next stops was the gas chromatography lab so before we get started and listen to the experts uh on gas chromatography let's just talk a little bit about what it is so gas chromatography is basically trying to find out all the different molecules the chemical composition that make up a liquid in this case fuel so how this works is you have a carrier gas and the purpose of the carrier gas is to carry the fuel that you're using through the columns so what we've got here is carrier gas a flow controller you're going to be injecting fuel into this uh column oven and there's a column inside of here which you're injecting the fuel through along with the carrier gas and that fuel mixture with carrier gas is going to travel through this column so i've got an image here where you can see uh what an actual column looks like and so as that those gases are moving through this column the different molecules move at different rates so because they move at different rates they exit at different times so this detector can detect what's coming out uh individually as those different molecules move through and then you can record all of the different molecules that come out and the different quantities of each molecule and get a chemical composition of the gas that you're looking at so it's it's like distillation taken to the extreme so basically samples injected into the instrument it travels through this column separated out into all of its component parts and each one of those is detected and then the detection detector sends that information to the computer which integrates all those peaks enables us to calculate the composition of that material in in a great deal of detail these are actually chromatograms this one of a motorsport fuel and this one of a normal road fuel and you can see there's some differences there particularly in the light cup um there's the number of uh pentana butane isomers in there giving more power to the motorsport fuel um a lot more combustion efficiency so this is this is where we're working out how the fuel is going to perform what we can answer what we can take away from it one thing about formula one fuel i mean maybe dave you can i don't know whether you can say a little bit more about this um the formula one fuel has to be substantially similar to conventional rolled road fuels we're working on 98 98 the same components yeah so we've only got a very very small margin about one percent to play with in terms of adding things to race fuels that wouldn't be in conventional gasoline now um however within that you know within conventional gasoline you've seen these are very complex mixtures there's a lot of components in there when we looked at the the difference between a conventional role fuel and formula one fuel we might find that we blend more volatile components into a formula one fuel to give it a boost in in that way you can play with density i think the formula is higher so higher octane so looking for um basically refinery components which go into conventional fuels that are high in the com in the uh the chemicals that are needed to give octane blending more of those within into the fuel within the properties envelope that we've got so you like i say you can you can shift density so that you can produce a fuel which they can get more fuel in the tank and run for longer or you can put more power into the fuel by enhancing octane or go for a more dense fuel with more power in it so there's lots of tricks that you can play depending on what the race strategy is next let's check out how shell measures engine wear and the effectiveness of different oils now we have to start looking at wear conditions so in the engine obviously a lot of moving parts some severe operation where you have high pressures high speeds these can take a toll on metal to metal contact that can occur now that's uh something that we want to prevent of course in the field but how do we understand that without doing a lot of engine testing uh doing a lot of field trials a lot spending a lot of money well what we've been able to do is take the portions of the engine that we know have the highest stresses the highest contact conditions and isolate them in a laboratory rig that that particularly uh emphasizes those particular conditions so that we get a good picture of the wear that occurs in the engine with our formulations now with that being said as i also mentioned this is a one-of-a-kind test rig so only shell has the opportunity to evaluate that sort of wear without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on expensive engine testing and field trials so when these are up and running it actually mimics the exact same conditions where you have that really severe contact and it's a 15 hour test so 15 hours of almost continuous metal and metal contact we can formulate lubricants that provide a protective film that protects and almost eliminate wear in those conditions so matt if you want to say anything else about the rigs or so basically these two rigs here are our heavy-duty uh diesel engine um brakes they mimic the cross-head wear on m11 cummins diesel engines uh scott said very very good tool for screening oils so we actually saved a lot of money uh in some very expensive engine testing by by running these through um basically this runs at about 600 newtons of force coming down onto the cross head itself and it uh reciprocates uh back and forth at about 20 hertz at 115 degrees c for as scott said 15 hours at the end of the test we pull the cross heads which at the end of the day this is what we're looking for is the scarring that occurs on these so in that arm it's reciprocating back and forth so as it comes to the beginning of the stroke and to the end of the stroke the oil film falls off so we have a little bit more contact there now across the middle here as it's coming across we can see that we've had quite a bit of oil formation to protect this metal piece shell also has a machine used to analyze the wear from cold starting an engine basically what we're able to do is simulate the cold start on on an engine this one is designed specifically for the tu3 peugeot engine and it simulates the wear between the camshaft and the followers so we are actually able to humidify this uh this block on the inside of here this chamber for the first part of the test and simulate the cold start of the engine which actually has been proven to show the most amount of wear so after that we run a second phase which is a hotter phase at a 100 degrees c which simulates after your engine is basically heated up we run it for an additional time and then pull it out and and kind of do the same thing where we run it on the profilometer get all the peaks and valleys and uh calculate volume and depth so i'm going to go ahead and turn this on for you it's going to make a little bit of noise here so don't be alarmed i'm going to start off at a low speed just so you can see the movement so as you can see this is a rolling and sliding rig the top arm is actually sliding back and forth and the disc at the bottom is rolling what it's doing is it's pulling oil out from that bath at the bottom and getting it onto the wheel and throwing it up into the sliding portion on the top so it's actually making a film in the in between which is creating a protective barrier between the metals so you have that metal on metal contact whenever this film is thrown up there it's like a sacrificial barrier between the two so i'm gonna amp this up a little bit and we're gonna see the speed that it actually runs back and if you look down and get you pretty much have to get about eye level with it you can actually see the film that's being formed in between the two components and we do a lot of collaborations with oems where they'll supply us with different types of metallurgy and we can test differences of metallurgy different loads all sorts of different things to mimic what's going finally we'll be checking out the clean machine and the clean machine is used to determine and analyze the cleanliness of pistons after extended use in an engine and the cool thing about this machine is you can use various different oils and analyze them together at the same time and so the sequence 3g test which is a very important test it ranks pistons on a scale from 1 to 10 with one being extremely dirty and 10 being perfectly clean this is what we want and what we've been able to do is turn these little glass tubes into mini pistons that match with what's happening in the engine and so what that does is it allows us using this rig the clean machine to be able to screen as you can see 12 different formulations at a time and then measure the deposit formation in real time so we start out with a tube that looks like this and over the time that it's running you can actually watch the deposits coming on and that helps us to understand the fundamental science behind what causes the engine to get dirty this machine is enabling us to look at the next generation of formulations so that we can continue to have products that are even cleaner and cleaner that will help with performance what are we seeing when this is moving so what happens when this moves is that when we were designing this we had a whole bunch of different prototypes and we had pistons that were going down and pistons that were going up and bob de cracker who is a scientist in our group was brilliant and he said well couldn't we make the rig simpler if we just had the oil suck up into the piston so to simulate the idea of the piston going up and down we have the oil coming up and coating the piston every minute for a set amount of time and then coming back down and that as you can see it's hard to see it from here but you can see the oil being sucked up and and coating the piston now one thing that we do to make this test even more challenging is that we put 50 of the new formulation and 50 use taxi oil and the reason to put in the use taxi oil is to really try and push it to the limit so that we can be able to differentiate um molecules that are going to really help us to stay clean now really this is just a small glimpse into some of the things that go on at the shell technology center but hopefully this provides a little insight into the science and technology that goes into the fuels and oils that you're putting into your cars so if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"