Proven advantage

In this challenging economic and competitive environment, your business may face cost, revenue and growth pressure.

Shell is a partner that is invested in helping you to grow your business and deliver more. Innovative gas-to-liquids based oils are a good example of this. Today’s more compact mobile fluid power systems have smaller hydraulic fluid reservoirs and can be more susceptible to aeration. Because the fluid volumes are smaller, reservoir residence times can be as short as 30 seconds, which leaves little time for air release. Fluid aeration reduces the efficiency and responsiveness and increases the noise of hydraulic systems.

To measure the impact of different base oils on this problem, we evaluated four ISO viscosity grade 46 fluids formulated with different base oils.

The PAO and GTL-based oils had significantly faster air release compared with the mineral-based oils, which resulted in less entrained air and up to 8% greater volumetric efficiency. We also recorded a 50% perceived reduction in sound. The difference between PAO and GTL is then simple economics.