Introduction: This project follows the successful completion of initial stage 1 work.

Whilst the initial project was considered a success in terms of a limited trial, this proposal is intended to gather a much wider sample population by installing a chromatic analysis system at ENW's Central Oil Reprocessing Depot (CORD) based at the Blackburn depot to enable every incoming oil sample to be analysed by both the traditional method and the chromatic method.

Objectives: The project aims are to establish if small changes in the optical signal of the oil caused by increased attenuation that would be indicative of chemical degradation by whatever mechanism can be detected, establish if any changes in the optical signal can be related to known degradation mechanisms and to establish if this can this be done through the oil-level site glass.

The stated objectives are:

• To collect sufficient oil samples to provide enough data to assess the performance of the laboratory based prototype monitoring system

• To make adjustments to the system to increase sensitivity

• To explore the sensitivity of the method for enabling assessment of oil condition

• To ascertain if the system could provide indicative values which relate to the key gas composition of the oil.

The resulting data will be analysed at the Liverpool University and compared to the chemical analysis data from CORD and various chromatic based algorithms will be used to analysis the data and correlation between the chromatic values and the traditional chemical analysis. The aim of the project is to further prove the technique based on larger sample sizes.