ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses about preliminaries on the book, ‘Lubricants and Waxes – From Basics to Applications’ before we go into details on it in the subsequent chapters. In this section, lubricant and wax have been defined first. We know lubricants and waxes exhibit certain physical properties, viz. viscosity, viscosity index, congealing temperature (pour point), oxidation, and thermal stabilities, etc. for lubricants, and viscosity, melting point, ductility, color, etc. for waxes, to meet the desired objectives in the machines in case of lubricants and to meet the desired objectives of various commercial/industrial items in use in case waxes. These physical properties are a result of the chemistry and chemical properties of constituents in lubricant and wax. Hence, these properties are also called physico-chemical properties. The lubricant is made from mainly lube base oil and minor quantities of certain chemicals/compounds (called additives) are used in it to boost the above properties as well as to incorporate some other properties to attain perfection to meet the objectives. Accordingly, here, chemistry, i.e. chemical composition of base oil and wax have been discussed in detail along with the chemistry of additives. Subsequently, various technologies developed to commercially produce lube base oil, wax and additives have also been discussed in a nut shell in this section which have been detailed in the subsequent chapters.
