LEADING speciality chemicals firm Lanxess has graced the recent Tire Technology Expo & Conference held 5-7 February in Cologne, and shared how the company’s product lines are shaping green mobility in environmental and label-friendly tyres.
“The worldwide tyre labeling initiatives are a key incentive for the global tyre industry, and our recent comprehensive survey of the SSBR market captured the mood of this industry,” said Christoph Kalla, head of Marketing in the Performance Butadiene Rubbers (PBR) business unit of specialty chemicals group Lanxess. “Anyone who is looking to make tyres even safer and even more economical needs advanced tyre rubbers,” remarks Kalla. “This is exactly what we’re focusing on – and that’s the message we’re aiming to get across at this year’s Tyre Technology Expo and Conference. We’re one of the most active suppliers when it comes to further improvement of the current generation of tyre rubbers,” he added.
Mônica Romero Santos Fernandes from Lanxess Elastômeros do Brasil SA, in her presentation, “Retread: a sustainable option with rubbers from Lanxess”, described how tyre treads’ abrasion properties can be improved by using Lanxess Buna SL instead of the emulsion SBR rubbers used to date, such as Buna SE. In conjunction with appropriate fillers, Buna SL can also help reduce treads’ rolling resistance, which goes a long way toward meeting the rising demand for energy-saving tyres. These findings are likely to be particularly beneficial for retreading. Replacing worn treads with new ones helps cut costs and reduce the number of tyres being thrown away. Retread tires that also save energy thanks to new Lanxess rubbers result in further significant environmental benefits.
Heike Kloppenburg from Lanxess’s BU Performance Butadiene Rubbers has discussed about the new NdBR grades from Lanxess, which he said are easier to process than the standard kinds. These NdBR grades offer similarly easy processing to rubbers such as cobalt-polybutadiene, while the tyre compound produces the good rolling resistance typical of NdBR.
The company’s SSBR expert Norbert Steinhauser discussed on a new technology for making functionalised SSBR using both the batch process and continuous polymerization. In application engineering tests on tire tread compounds, the new functionalised SSBR grades demonstrate far lower rolling resistance and the same good wet grip as the SSBR grades previously supplied by the company. The manufacture of these functionalised SSBR grades has been successfully transferred from the laboratory to industrial-scale production. Initial results from tyre tests confirm the findings of the application engineering tests.
Another speaker from Lanxess, Alex Lucassen has presented results of the comprehensive tyre tests the company has been performing for around a year. In a nutshell, laboratory data is still important but there are certain aspects that can only be tested correctly on the product itself. Tyre test stand data is vital for the development of optimal tyre rubbers. This is proof of the importance of collaboration between raw material manufacturers and tyre producers.
Polymer physicist Saeid Kheirandish explains how critical rubber processing parameters can influence the tyre compound’s properties. The latest polybutadiene generation, for example, boasts both high energy efficiency and a longer service life – two aspects that are particularly important for tyre rubbers but have so far been hard to combine. The process window for the production of optimal products, however, is relatively narrow. Taking a rheological perspective, Kheirandish describes the impact that the selection of optimum process parameters such as extrusion speed and temperature have on the compound’s properties and the limits processors may need to consider.
Goran Stojcevic, technical marketing manager, Lanxess NV, Belgium has also presented how bromobutyl rubber could enhance a tyre’s traction and safety properties. Brominated isobutylene/isoprene, used for years as a key component in inner-liner production has good damping properties. Using an appropriate compound formulation in ultra-high-performance treads, brominated isobutylene/isoprene can help ensure high energy efficiency while also significantly improving road traction.
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