Instrument Roles in Lubrication Research

TO WATCH RESEARCH in any field is to witness the growing ascendancy of the instrument which, in turn, becomes increasingly automatic. Reference has been made in a previous article (Automation in the Laboratory, January, 1964) to the gradual automation of some of the routine chores in the petroleum laboratory, so that lubrication research is undergoing very much the same evolution as that on, say, biological or purely physical investigations. But with the growth of instrumental techniques comes higher accuracy and a closer response to what is statistically desirable in arriving at sound conclusions. It is sufficiently well‐known that the large oil companies and the leaders in the additive field deploy instrumental methods to the full, as an inescapable approach to their problems many of which could hardly be handled by other methods, and certainly not by older manual methods.