page_title: Oil
section_title: Lubrication
hierarchical_section_title: Oil / Applications / Lubrication
caption_attribution_description: Mobil 1 Synthetic motor oil.
context_page_description: An oil is any nonpolar chemical substance that is a viscous liquid at ambient temperatures and is both hydrophobic and lipophilic. Oils have a high carbon and hydrogen content and are usually flammable and surface active. Most oils are unsaturated lipids that are liquid at room temperature.
  The general definition of oil includes classes of chemical compounds that may be otherwise unrelated in structure, properties, and uses. Oils may be animal, vegetable, or petrochemical in origin, and may be volatile or non-volatile. They are used for food, fuel, medical purposes, lubrication, and the manufacture of many types of paints, plastics, and other materials. Specially prepared oils are used in some religious ceremonies and rituals as purifying agents.
context_section_description: Given that they are non-polar, oils do not easily adhere to other substances. This makes them useful as lubricants for various engineering purposes. Mineral oils are more commonly used as machine lubricants than biological oils are. Whale oil is preferred for lubricating clocks, because it does not evaporate, leaving dust, although its use was banned in the USA in 1980.
  It is a long-running myth that spermaceti from whales has still been used in NASA projects such as the Hubble Telescope and the Voyager probe because of its extremely low freezing temperature. Spermaceti is not actually an oil, but a mixture mostly of wax esters, and there is no evidence that NASA has used whale oil.
caption: Synthetic motor oil
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