Volume 2 Issue 1 - Lubrication
Written by Dan Watson
The ongoing march to achieve more technologically advanced engines continues and certainly the GM Duramax diesel engine exemplifies that quest. The race between GM and its would-be competition has benefited you and me: the improvement in all aspects of these diesel engines is easily quantifiable in terms of horsepower and torque as well as fuel efficiency and endurance. Recognizing how vastly improved these diesels are to their predecessors, it should not surprise anyone that advances in the lubricants for these engines have also facilitated quantum leaps in performance.
Any oil, properly rated for use in a high performance turbo-charged engine, is a remarkable lubricant regardless of the base oil used. In this article, I will compare synthetic diesel engine oil to petroleum diesel engine oil and draw some conclusions and make some recommendations. Previous Lube Notes have established fundamentals of lubrication and how oil is made, so if you haven’t read those, a review might be in order. I am writing this article assuming you have read the preceding articles.
Click here to see a summary of costs comparison for petroleum oil vs synthetic oil...
To start, we should compare several performance criteria for petroleum oil vs synthetic oil...
