When we think of grease, we think of animal fat and the residue left over from making a big plate of bacon and eggs. However, there are other types of grease out there, some of which have applications in the world of commerce.

Greases in the past have been made of sodium, lithium and even calcium jelly. Most of these types of grease are added with mineral oil to create commercially-productive products. In fact, mineral oil is an inert general purpose lubricant itself, but with a lower viscosity when it is compared to the other types of greases in the world.

Inert greases are very special to our current civilization because they are used in so many different commercial applications around the world. These inert greases use various forms of fluorochemicals in the processing because of the ingredient Fluorine, which can combine itself with nearly any other element in the Periodic Table. It is a very simple element, numbering nine on the Periodic Table, but it has thousands of uses.

Inert greases are used in the automotive industry extensively, but they are also used in some other not so obvious industries as well. Inert greases are used on the valves of tanks that hold chlorine, oxygen and hydrogen because fluorochemical are very resistant to corrosion. Teflon is a perfect example of a fluorochemical that resists corrosiveness.

Inert greases with fluorochemicals in them are also used extensively in medicine to improve the safety of the oxygen that is provided to patients who are unable to breath by themselves. This may not seem like a volatile situation, but any time you have a highly reactive gas like oxygen stored under high pressure, the substance that the gas comes into contact with during storage must be highly inert as a result.

Sebastian Schneider is a freelance writer who writes about issues and topics pertaining to the use of Inert Greases.



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