Hyphenated structural identification of additives in transmission fluids

Transmission fluids and other lubricants are used to reduce friction in engines and other surfaces. Additives in these transmission fluids are important for prolonging their lifetime and obtaining the desired physical properties for the lubricant. In this work, we show the successful structural identification of an important class of additives in transmission fluids by hyphenating several analytical techniques in-line. First, a separation of the additives in a transmission fluid was achieved within 10 minutes by using supercritical fluid chromatography. SFC-(1)H NMR was then used as a novel analysis method to structurally identify different additives in transmission fluids, in combination with mass spectrometry data. By this unique hyphenation of SFC, NMR spectroscopy and MS, several alkylated diphenylamines were identified, which are one of the most important classes of antioxidants.