Modeling of lubricant performance in Kurt Orbahn tests for viscosity modifiers based on star polymers (Q2467141)

The paper is devoted to modeling of stress-induced degradation of star polymers dissolved in a liquid lubricant. First, a system of kinetic integro-differential equations for degradation of lubricants with star polymeric additives is derived on the base of the statistical approach by analyzing the kinetics of arm scission disregarding the effect of the presence of organic cores of polymer molecules. These equations are obtained with assumption that the concentration of the polymer additive in a lubricant is small, and the arms of different star molecules as well as of the same ones do not interact with each other. Moreover, in the paper are assumed that the arms of star polymer molecules are stretched along the lubricant flow streamlines and the polymer additive degrades due to stress-induced scission. Then the probabilities of scission and the density of the conditional probability which control the process of lubricant degradation are stated. By assuming that the arms of the polymeric molecules are distributed chaotically with respect to their chain lengths, the modeling of forming star molecules from linear molecules and cores is carried out. Based on test observations of the molecular weight of single polymer arms which are normally distributed, the approximation process for distribution of star polymeric additives is constructed. Further, the dependence of the lubricant viscosity on the distribution of the molecular weight is found. Some properties of solution of the stated initial-value problem for kinetic equations are studied. First, it is considered a theorem of existence and uniqueness for the solution of the problem for degradation of linear polymer additive. Then, some results on the existence and uniqueness of solution of the kinetic equations, describing the stress-induced polymer degradation in an incompressible lubricant fluid, are present. Finally, the numerically obtained results for star polymer molecular weight distributions and viscosity loss caused by degradation are compared with the Kurt Orbahn test data for hydrogenated styrene-isoprene star polymer additives.