Lubrizol Enhances Global Testing Capabilities

CLEVELAND—Lubrizol Additives, a business segment of The Lubrizol Corporation, announces continued enhancements to its global research and testing capabilities to better serve the needs of its worldwide customer base. Recent and ongoing improvements to its existing network of technical facilities will help the company deliver the right balance of advanced testing and technical capabilities to meet the needs of worldwide demand.

In the past three years, Lubrizol has invested more than $35 million capital to support R&D and testing activities, with another $50 million budgeted for the next three years. This is in addition to extensive capital investment in operations, which includes more than $200 million for a new plant in China.

Hazelwood Technical Center

Significant investments are underway at Lubrizol’s global technical center in Hazelwood, UK. These investments include recently completed major upgrades of chemical testing laboratories as well as ongoing improvements to the Hazelwood chemical synthesis facility. In the past decade, the size of the chemical synthesis team at Hazelwood has nearly doubled, pushing existing synthesis capacity to its saturation point. In order to ensure efficient chemical synthesis and superior customer service, Lubrizol has made investments in infrastructure and equipment, including the acquisition of state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) capabilities on site. NMR spectroscopy is one of the principal techniques used to obtain physical, chemical, electronic and structural information about molecules. The NMR suite in Hazelwood will accelerate the development of new molecules and provide faster analysis in problem-solving.

Many updates to the Hazelwood technical facility will be complete by the end of this year, with further extensive upgrades anticipated in the next two years. “We’re very excited about a new Field Testing Center that will soon support the more than one million kilometers of data gathered every week globally in the field on Lubrizol products,” notes Phil Shore, Lubrizol vice president of testing. “Beginning later this year, we are also expanding our laboratory blend room capabilities. Yet another example of how we continue to invest in our research and testing capabilities.”