Oil & Gas | AMERICAN ELEMENTS® (original) (raw)

American Elements is a long standing supplier to numerous oil & gas producers and their refineries, including Shell, Chevron, BP and Exxon Mobil. We also supply starting raw materials to key oil cracking catalyst manufacturers, such as W.R. Grace and the BASF division, formerly the Engelhard Corporation.

Our Trifloron dry film lubricant is now an industry standard for bolt breakaway during oil refinery maintenance.

Question? Speak to an American Elements engineer at [email protected]

#24: American Elements Launches First Ultra High Temperature Dry Lubricant

The Challenge

Lubricants are critical to all forms of manufacturing, but the most challenging environments are those involving high temperatures and pressures in which most lubricants simply decompose. One such environment is the high temperature operations of oil refineries. Shell Oil sought a lubricant it could coat on its high temperature bolts at its Deer Park, Texas refinery to assure the bolts could be removed during subsequent maintenance programs. Standard industrial lubricants such as molybdenum disulfide were useless because they break down at the temperatures oil refineries operate at.

The Innovation

American Elements’ researchers examined the chemical structures of various lubricant materials and then explored the potential for high temperature materials with similar structures. This led to the discovery that a class of rare earth fluorides shared the hexagonal layered structure that allows molybdenum disulfide to perform as it does. Further experimentation confirmed that this class of material could in fact function as moly sulfide, but at much higher temperatures.

The Result

After further in situ testing at several refineries, in 2005 American Elements launched Trifloron™ , a new class of high temperature dry lubricants which today is a standard "bolt breakaway" lubricant in oil & gas refineries.