XADO Is Not an Additive

I. What Is an Additive?

An additive is a substance blended into oil to improve its lubricating performance and reduce friction and wear. Additives have been around for a long time; they come in many forms, each with its own mode of action and level of effectiveness. Most have to be replenished regularly, typically with every oil change, to keep doing their job.

Lubricating oils and greases exist first and foremost to lubricate: to seal mating clearances, cut friction and wear, and carry heat away. Take the internal combustion engine of a car or motorcycle as an example. A typical oil-change interval falls somewhere around 60 to 100 hours of running, or roughly 2,000 to 3,000 km. Through the first half of that interval, lubrication and wear protection hold up well. After that, the combined mechanical, physical, chemical and thermal stresses of operation gradually wear those properties down, and surface wear sets in and accelerates. An additive extends wear protection for longer, but in the second half of the oil’s service life the wear still happens. This gradual decline in the oil’s physicochemical properties is easy to measure with instruments and often noticeable by feel alone.

The additives we most commonly come across fall into a few groups.

– The most common are film-forming additives, which are easy to use and need topping up at every oil change or after a short period. They lay down a protective film on the surface from soft-metal particles such as copper, zinc, aluminum and tin, but because most mechanical parts are made of ferrous metal, the bond between film and surface is weak. The film tends to flake off in patches under load and friction, and a distinct boundary stays between the protective film and the part itself, a boundary where galvanic corrosion can take hold.

– A second group, the adhesion-improving additives, strengthens the bond between the lubricating film and the friction surface, though getting good results means picking the right additive and keeping its concentration steady in the oil, since too high a concentration will compromise the oil’s flow and the machine’s performance.

– A third group, the surface-modifying additives, improves the physical and mechanical properties of the friction surface, but these are far from universal: because the processes involved are complex, the additive has to be matched carefully to each specific friction system and component material, with its concentration kept stable.

In short, additives are a way to protect friction surfaces and slow wear, and to get the most from them you need the right product, used consistently at every oil change.

More recently, scientists have developed a new class of chemical materials that can actually reverse wear and rebuild the friction surface. Depending on the material used, the newly formed surface can take on exceptional properties. This is an emerging field, still in its early days, and XADO is one of these new materials.

II. XADO Revitalizant Is Not an Additive

XADO is a chemical compound that repairs wear and protects the metal parts of machinery against friction and wear. Because you add it to the oil, it’s easy to assume it behaves like an additive, but the principle behind it is fundamentally different. An additive acts on the oil film, whereas XADO acts on the crystalline structure of the part’s surface layer. After treatment, the worn friction surfaces are coated with a ceramic-metal layer whose physicochemical properties far surpass those of the original metal. This layer does two things at once: it makes up for the material lost to wear, and it protects against further wear and corrosion, in effect transforming the surface properties of the friction zone. XADO is only needed during the restoration stage; afterward you simply run ordinary oil with no XADO in it.

In its analysis, QUATEST 3 confirmed the point clearly: XADO contains the components needed to form a ceramic-metal layer, and is not used as a mineral-oil additive.

Telling XADO and an additive apart isn’t hard. Once a XADO treatment is complete, switch to fresh oil containing no additive, drive for a while, long or short it doesn’t matter, and you’ll find the engine still strong; measure its technical parameters and they read just as they did right after restoration, with the benefit holding for a very long time. Do the same with an additive and the result is different, because without the additive the engine runs weaker than it did with it, and even with the additive in the oil the engine’s readings in the first half of the oil’s life are higher than in the second half, since an additive only raises wear resistance temporarily, while it is present and still active. As a further demonstration, XADO Vietnam ran a “no-oil engine endurance test” after a XADO treatment, and after hours of running the engine remained in perfect condition; you couldn’t do the same with an additive, as it would destroy the engine.

III. XADO vs. Additives at a Glance

Property / Result	XADO	Conventional Additive
Durability	Increased 2–3×	Modest increase
Effective interval per application	Long, up to 50,000 km and beyond	Short, 2,000 to 10,000 km
Wear restoration	Restores wear	None, or very little
Noise and vibration	Greatly reduced	Somewhat reduced
Corrosion protection	Excellent	Adequate
Re-treatment interval	Every 50,000 to 70,000 km	Every oil change, or every few
Oil and grease compatibility	Compatible with all	Must be chosen carefully
Friction coefficient	Reduced to 0.003	Reduced to 0.012
Engine power recovery	Restored to rated value and held for a very long time	A boost early in the oil-change cycle only
Effect on maintenance costs	Lowers repair costs and saves time; fuel savings quickly recoup the cost of XADO	Adds the ongoing cost of buying additive

Having a range of products on the market to tackle friction and wear is good news for consumers, because it widens the choice people can make based on their own knowledge, habits and trust. In the end, the customer decides.

For more on XADO, see Wikipedia:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XADO
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revitalizant