Bangkok--17 Nov--Verve
Shell is proud to claim that its 1 billion US Dollars (approximately 30 billion Thai baht) per year budget for research and development is the largest such annual investment in the world petroleum industry. To see how all that money is spent, one would need to a very long series of trips around the world. So, the nest best thing is to visit one of Shell Group’s seven research facilities — one that cost 90 million US Dollars (2.7 billion Baht) to run each year.
Nestled in one corner of Germany’s busiest sea shipping hub, Hamburg, is Shell’s PAE Labor — that’ German for abbreviation for products, applications and development (or “Produkt”, “Anwendung”, “Entwicklung” and “Labor” is German for laboratory). As father to both the world’s first petroleum-powered motorcycle and automobile, Germany has always been the leader in motorized mobility — if not in volume, then it still is in terms of innovations — with a thriving automobile industry. Thus, by locating a “think tank” in Germany enables Shell to tap in on the best supply of brains in the industry — the most important aspect in any successful businesses. Moreover, being situated right by Germany’s largest sea port, logistics of materials and equipment are efficient.
Established in 1956, PAE Labor was a brainchild of the visionary energy company. More than 250 staff employed here comprises graduates in a wide variety of technical disciplines including chemists, physicists and engineers. More than 10 scientists who work here full-time even have doctorate degree in relevant fields. Together, they undertake research and development of a wide variety of petroleum products such as motor oils, brake fluids and fuels for motorcycles and cars to marine and industrial use.
Many of Shell automotive fuels and lubricants available around the world, including Thailand, have their origins in the PAE Labor. The scientists here are tasked with developing new, improved products in state-of-the-art laboratories, test beds and simulators. To develop new motor oil, for example, the scientists start with a base oil (mineral, semi-synthetic or fully-synthetic) then add a bundle of additives to enhance it in the hope of achieving a certain set of standards. To test this formula on lab equipment, the results would not reflect real-world use, so they here they also use simulators.
In a simulator room, an actual engine is installed with outside air hosed in, exhaust pumped out via filtration system and all sorts of sensors attached to monitor its performance and efficiency. A computer runs the engine remotely using bespoke software to make it work in similar ways to an actual engine would in the real-world driving condition. It starts, it revs gently, it revs hard, it peaks, it idles and it stops et cetera. That may sound easy enough, but the neat trick is that you can turn this whole room to a freezing minus 30 degrees or stifling 40 Celsius to simulate extreme climatic conditions. The simulator would typically run a test like this for many, many days continuously simulating driving distances of tens to hundreds of thousands of kilometers — something that would take years to achieve in the real world. Of course, the oil is changed at normal service intervals for analyses. And by the end of the test run, the engine is disassembled so scientists and engineers can inspect the internal parts for wear and tear.
If the oil used managed to pass all the specified standards with flying colours — i.e. exceed existing or future, preset standards — then it would get considered for production. But if it does not, then the oil needs to be improved by adjusting formulation and the whole testing procedure is repeated all over again and again until the desired results are achieved. As you can imagine, this task is extremely tedious in nature — taking anywhere from days to weeks - and no one other than highly qualified scientists, engineers and technicians can be asked to carry it out. Don’t forget all the costs for fuel, power for testing equipment and wages for the personnel involved. And they have not one but several of these simulators, but due to site restriction we were not allowed to film any of these rooms.
Apart from simulators, PAE Labor also has a number of test beds to accommodate running whole vehicles or just the drivetrains ranging anywhere from motorcycles to cars and from tractor trucks to ship engines (yes, a whole ship would be a too big). These test beds test the lubricants, fuels and drivetrains in similar ways to a simulator but for much shorter periods. On the day we visited it, we witnessed a Ducati road bike being tested. Shell is a technical partner with Ducati — meaning that they co-develop lubricants and fuels both for Ducati road bikes and the factory Ducati Corse race team whose riders include the 9-times world champion Valentino Rossi and world champion Nicky Hayden. We are told that the lubricants and fuels that go into the road and race versions of Ducati are actually 99% similar, with the last one percent being the different additives to achieve different goals. For instance, a race engine need to run for only a few hundred kilometers in 4 races with oil changes after every run, where as you would expect road bikes to do several thousand before an oil change. The protections both need are similar, but the race engine need less detergent to clean out soot as it stays there for a very brief time.
And if all that still do not impress you, then how about something totally unique? Shell boasts the world’s only mobile lubricant and fuel lab to be regularly stationed at racing events. Because of the extremely fierce and rapid competition in world level motorsports such as Formula 1, MotoGP and Le Mans, being able to analyze oil and fuel properties on the spot can provide the race team engineers with valuable information with which they can work on right away. For example, emission spectrochemical analysis (they heat up the oil into gas then use light refraction to “see” the chemical components) to see its of an oil sample take from a race motorcycle can determine whether or not there is abnormal wear in the engine caused by faulty internal parts or that the air-fuel mixture was inappropriate for the race conditions. Armed with correct information, the team engineers would then be able to take a suitable course of actions. This kind of prompt preventive and corrective measures would not have been possible if the oil analysis were to take days in shipment and queued up for testing in a permanent lab halfway across the world. PAE Labor is home location for the Shell Trackside Laboratory, which does get very busy during racing season.
There are very facilities, if any, in the world that can compare to the PAE Labor. Marketing cannot make a good product — in fact, marketing cannot create a product at all, in reality - but research and development can. So, the bottom line is, when you buy a Shell lubricant, for example, you can be certain that you are actually paying for one of the most comprehensively tested product in the world and not just a marketing hype like a few other brands. So, if someone else claims they spend anywhere near as much money on developing their products, we would love to see it, too. But then, we probably never will.
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