The field of lubricant additives has seen a wide variety of materials used to reduce friction and wear between moving parts. Lubricants are composed principally of a base stock and a lubricant additive. The lubricant additive provides the antifriction and antiwear characteristics to the lubricant. The base stock imparts improved viscosity and thermal oxidative stability, which can be improved by the addition of various additives. One significant advance in the field was the invention of a material called a "telomer". The telomer invention is described in WO92/07051 and in U.S. Pat. No. 5,229,023, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein.
Briefly, a telomer is a polymerized triglyceride oil, principally derived from a seed oil, that has thermal oxidative stability and viscosity improvement characteristics that makes the telomer an essential component of a large variety of lubricant compositions. The process to synthesize telomers begins with a triglyceride and heats the oil in a non-oxidizing atmosphere with a trace water catalyst to lower the iodine number such that no more than 4% of the fatty acid chains of the telomerized vegetable oil are polyunsaturated. The triglyceride vegetable oils are characterized as having from about 10% to about 75% polyunsaturated fatty acid chains of from about 16 to about 26 carbon atoms in length.
The present invention was made in an effort to improve the telomer product by lowering temperature of formation and time of heating and by improving viscosity and color characteristics of the telomer product.