Bob K.,
Thank you much for jumping in and offering help to Frank. Especially, because the RULER is “your baby”, which makes you being the right person to do it. He appears very enthusiastic and is trying to do the right thing, but seems slowly getting lost in trying to find ways to interpret RULER result. I think that folks at the lab that Frank was using obviously did not do much for him, except sending him dry test data. Is it my impression that they don’t know much about it, except just running the RULER analyzer.
As I mentioned before, (some folks wouldn’t believe it!) we have some oils that are “older than dirt” (some are 40+ years oil and still in service). More typical age is 25-30 years in service. How authentic those oils are it is hard to tell, because our folks added a lot of make up oil to it during those years (somebody shout SWEETENING). We also have powerhouses running new Group 2 oils, too (the ones that changed their turbine oil in the last 10 years). So, of course, we still have some oils with ZDTP in it. Do we have phenolic-based additives too? It could very well be the case, because we added over the years make up oils that may have had these types of additives. Unfortunately, I could not be more specific because I am not a blender nor have I ran RULER or mass spectrometer to check it out. However, we simply relied on RPVOT in combination with other characteristics to assess remaining service life of our R&O turbine oils. It has been working flawlessly and reliably so far, and for that reason I am not “hot” about RULER at this time. By the way, we have approx. million and a half gallons of turbine oil in our powerhouses.