Magellan International Lube & Chemical is a small company based in the US, that designs and sells products for heavy industry and the performance world. The company's owner has been successful in solving solutions for NASA and he has been inducted into the NASA Space technology Hall of Fame for Advanced Lubrication Technology.
Magellan's research team has been attracted to graphene years ago, and have spent over 5 years testing and developing the ability to enhance its lubricants with graphene materials. The company's first project was to develop a graphene-enhanced assembly lube.
Assembly lubes are normally high-viscosity oils with tackifiers used to protect engines against wear during start up. Following years of R&D, Magellan managed to create an excellent lube utilizing a combination of additives and graphene- that needs only a single drop to protect a bearing and race under extreme pressure. The production process it has designed is not straightforward, made in a lab-type production environment and so is still expensive.
Following its success with the first product, the company has started to develop more graphene-enhanced products. First up is to develop what it refers to as a 'super lube', a sprayable lubricant with highly increased performance, superior penetration, and one that can be sprayed on any surface to protect it from corrosion, salt air and water. The company is mostly targeting the boating industry and salt water environments.
Magellan already blended several types of graphene into its existing high-performance spray lubricants, and tested it in several environments, to see how it handles rust and corrosion. It took several experiments and different materials, but the company has been able to find a successful path towards the project's completion.
One of the main realizations the company has reached is that working with graphene is not straightforward, and one should be ready to test many graphene types (as there are many different ones with different attributes), and try different processes in order to find the right formula. But it is worth it as graphene-enhanced materials provide a real performance boost when developed correctly.