TLT: How long have you worked in a lubrication-related field, and how did you decide to pursue a career in the lubricants industry? 
Kaperick: I’ve been working for Afton since 1991 when I finished up my master’s degree in analytical chemistry at St. Louis University. The St. Louis plant of Ethyl Petroleum Additives, Inc. (now Afton Chemical Corp., Richmond, Va.) was looking for an analytical chemist, and one of my classmates happened to work there and brought it to my attention. I had no idea what Ethyl made, so I went to the university library, researched the company, applied for the job and then started work for them in February 1991. I provided support for the process chemistry department as they scaled up new products or did troubleshooting on current products, and I supported the QC Lab, helped develop new methods and resolved problems with current ones. So, at that time, I was much more internally focused on components and not on how they were used.

I started being more involved in the finished lubricants side of the business in 1999 when I accepted a customer technical service position within Afton at their Richmond, Va., headquarters. At the time, my focus was fairly broad—I was responsible for automatic transmission, automotive gear and industrial fluids, but it introduced me to a lot of the basics with regard to applications and use of lubricants including the basic concepts of tribology.

Grease was a relatively small part of that portfolio, but my supervisor’s strategy was to put more resources into the lower volume, higher value industrial area. He helped set up a separate strategic business unit to focus on additives for industrial lubricants including greases. Over time I ended up spending more and more time involved in the grease area, which then led to more involvement in industry organizations such as STLE and NLGI. Today my focus is almost exclusively on grease lubrication and helping my customers to meet the performance goals for their finished greases through the additive formulation and testing expertise that we offer.

So while I never actually “pursued” a career in lubricants, I do like to tell people that my path started with social lubricants as a bartender in St. Louis, and I graduated to what I do today through a lot of fortuitous circumstances. 

TLT: What has been your most rewarding accomplishment throughout your career in the lubricants industry? 
Kaperick: I went to my first NLGI (formerly the National Lubricating Grease Institute) Annual Meeting in October 2001, about two months after 9/11. Participation was severely limited, very few attendees were able to come from overseas, and there was a hurricane offshore. I don’t think that I’ve missed an NLGI Annual Meeting since 2001. At every NLGI meeting, I found that people were welcoming and passionate about the subject of lubricating grease, the technical program was fantastic, and the meeting showed me the possibilities of an application area that I didn’t know a lot about at the time. Six years later in 2007, Dick Kuhlman (a former NLGI president) stepped down off the board to make room for me to join the board as Afton’s representative, and that set my course for the next 15 years working with the NLGI board.

My experience of working through the chairs of the executive committee, including two years as president, and the accomplishments that I was able to be a part of during that time have been the most professionally rewarding things that I have ever done. The highlight is probably the work we did to bring out the new High-Performance Multiuse (HPM) grease specification, which required a huge amount of effort by a very dedicated and passionate group of industry experts, which was completed in December 2020 (in the midst of a global pandemic!).

The NLGI community has been fantastic, and I have many memories, experiences and friends today that are all due to my time within the NLGI community. My professional life has been greatly enhanced through skills gained from working on the NLGI board. 

TLT: How do you see industry standards transforming, specifically with regards to electric vehicles? 
Kaperick: I see most of the industry standards that will be affected in the electric vehicle space as being related to driveline fluids with a heavy emphasis on areas like conductivity and efficiency. However, in the lubricating grease area, I don’t believe the challenges have been well-defined by the OEMs, and I believe there is a wide disparity in OEM approaches that will probably prevent an industrywide standard for these types of greases.

However, working on the board of NLGI, I believe that we are transforming how industry standards can be used by giving guidance to grease consumers through specifying a core level of performance for greases used in a wide variety of applications. In the grease area, there are not a lot of market general specifications for grease, and the most popular one (NLGI’s GC-LB specification) was originally released in 1989 and was meant exclusively as a guide for automotive chassis and wheel bearing lubrication. Over the years, this specification was adopted by others as a guide indicating a grease was “good” for many different applications that it wasn’t necessarily meant to cover. Once you start going to these technical meetings, you start to learn more and see what opportunities are available to you.

In 2020, NLGI rolled out the new HPM specification. This new set of standards includes core performance measures that an industrywide task force decided should be the basis of a good multiuse grease. Our thought in putting these specifications together was that it would give assurance to an end-user or OEM that these greases had a minimum level of performance that was certified and audited by NLGI. This allows for better communication between an applications specialist and a grease manufacturer since the core performance is already defined. Any additional performance needs that are specific to a particular application can then be the focus for discussion.

The HPM program already has specification for core performance as well as additional “tags” for extra performance in the areas of high load (HL), corrosion resistance (CR), water resistance (WR) and low temperature (LT). Additional areas of focus that are currently being developed include long life and high temperature greases. 



TLT: What are some of the most technical lubrication-based concepts or topics you have encountered throughout your career? 
Kaperick: The whole concept of tribology and tribolayers was relatively new to me as an analytical chemist but one that obviously plays a large role in grease lubrication as it does in oil-based formulations. The difference for the grease field is that the traditional “competition for surface” that we usually talk about with lubricant additives is further complicated with the introduction of a polar matrix (the grease thickener) that competes with the metal surface to attract polar additives. This results in non-intuitive or unexpected results if one comes from a background of formulating oils such as industrial gear or hydraulic fluids. It makes the job of formulating greases that much more complex as well as keeping it very interesting and challenging from a technical perspective. 

TLT: Please share your experience and lessons learned in your journey with specific advice to younger tribologists. 
Kaperick: Two main pieces of advice for younger tribologists (or really, anyone working in a technical area in lubrication) are to get involved and to communicate.

Getting involved in industry organizations can be extremely rewarding for you, your company—and for the organization. And getting involved is more than going to an STLE or NLGI meeting or joining ASTM, although that’s a good start. Once you start going to these technical meetings, you start to learn more and see what opportunities are available to you. These could be technical ideas on how to approach your next formulation challenge, or new customers with challenges you have already solved or new tools that you weren’t aware of. But the real rewards start when you get involved—by sharing your own work and your own ideas. This begins an immensely positive cycle in which you ultimately get back more than you give and can be very rewarding for you both personally and professionally.

What I believe often holds people back from being more involved is the communication aspect. For me personally, I know that public speaking was never something that I enjoyed, and the lack of confidence in talking to a group certainly stopped me from being more social in high school and college. Mostly, I think this is driven by fear that people won’t find what you are saying to be of interest, or worse that they will disagree with you. My experience is that forcing yourself into situations where you must speak to people, either individually or in a group setting, almost always results in a positive experience and builds your confidence so that you are less nervous about it the next time. For me those opportunities started as a bartender (where I had to talk to people because I had nowhere to hide) but extended into technical conversations with colleagues and then customers, and finally into presentations at STLE, NLGI or other conferences.

The hardest one for me was presentations because you’re in front of a large group of people trying to explain your research clearly. If you can find a way to tell your “story” in a way that is comfortable and entertaining to you, it will generally be more comfortable and engaging for the audience. If the audience is engaged, that will be obvious and, in turn, will come back to you in a positive way that will hopefully encourage you to do it again. And once you can speak comfortably in front of a larger audience, it becomes much easier to express your opinion in a meeting with colleagues or lead a technical team or become actively involved in an industry organization. 

TLT: What is the one thing you wish you would have learned earlier in your career? 
Kaperick: Understanding just how nice many people in the lubrication field are would have helped me be more confident and more involved in my early years. People who I meet through organizations like STLE and NLGI or through customer interactions are almost invariably enthusiastic and passionate about the field, are eager to learn more and are usually very willing to patiently explain things to newcomers and to share their knowledge with them. 

You can reach Joe Kaperick at Joe.Kaperick@AftonChemical.com.