Abstract
Oil viscosity is one of the important parameters for machinery condition monitoring. Basically, it is expressed as kinematic viscosity measured by capillary flow and dynamic or absolute viscosity measured by rotary shear viscometry. Recently, acoustic wave techniques appear in the market, measuring viscosity as the product of dynamic viscosity and density. For Newtonian fluids, knowledge of density allows conversion from one viscosity parameter to the other at a specific shear rate and temperature. In this work, oil samples with different chain lengths of viscosity index (VI) improvers and concentrations were examined by different viscometric techniques. Results showed that acoustic viscosity measurements give misleading results for oil samples with high molecular weight VI improvers and at low temperatures ${\leq}40^{\circ}C$.