Why is it necessary to change vehicle oil regularly, and not just change the filter and add new oil as needed?
In: Engineering
Technically with sufficient filtering, you can do what you suggested with fully-synthetic oil. But it would require engines to be designed for it, which they aren’t.
There are some particles that pass through the filter. Rather than filtering, we get rid of those fine particles with regular oil changes. Without changing the oil periodically, these smaller particles would build up and gunk things up. Simply adding a finer filter would mess up the designed oil pressure and flow rates. To address this, there are better filters that try to stay within the engine spec for flow rates and pressures, and some oil plugs are magnetized to try to capture these small particles without messing with the flow rates, but that doesn’t capture everything.
But in theory, it would be possible to design an engine to work with a filter fine enough to remove all particles, and then all you would need to do is change the filter and top off the oil. But car engines just aren’t designed for that.
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