September

In December 2015, the United Nations Climate Change Conference was held in Paris. The conference negotiated the Paris Agreement, which is a global agreement on the reduction of climate change. At the follow-up climate change conference in Marrakech (COP22) in November 2016, the member states of the Kyoto Protocol agreed to set the goal of limiting global warming to a still acceptable level of less than 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. This target requires that the zero emission of CO2 is achieved soon.

Developing tire tread formulations for electric vehicles (EVs) presents a unique challenge. Instantaneous high torque and vehicle dynamics demand traction performance, while owner expectations for battery life and range highlight the need for very low rolling resistance compounds. In addition, vehicle weight and new environmental pressures increase the need for improved durability and abrasion resistance.

Use of treated silica as a filler in passenger, truck and bus tires is explored, including how using treated precipitated silica can overcome manufacturing limitations associated with conventional high dispersible silica/in situ silane technology.

The TRP Reworker is a resource saving technology for the economical processing of rework materials based on the two-roll plasticizer (TRP) with integrated Roll Ex gear pump. In an automatic process, unvulcanized rubber compounds are processed particularly gently and continuously in order to return this rework material to the production process. In tire production, compound waste is unavoidable due to the process.

Operations in the tire pyrolysis sector, as part of the tire recycling industry, are maturing to become not recycling operations, but serious producers of high grade raw materials in the rubber supply chain, on equal footing with virgin materials.

It is known that the oil used as a plasticizing agent in rubber compounds has historically been of petroleum origin. These oils include distillate aromatic extract (DAE), treated distillated aromatic extract (TDAE) and medium extracted solvate (MES). Since 2011, Goodyear has been investigating the utility of soybean oil (SBO) as an alternative to replace petroleum based oils. It was found that the unique structural (figure 1) and physical properties of SBO can be harnessed to provide improvements in compound processing and performance for tire applications. Since this discovery, Goodyear has developed multiple products that make use of SBO through extension in solution styrene-butadiene rubber (SSBR) and as a raw material in tire compounds. The benefits of SBO were harnessed through these avenues to create the Assurance WeatherReady tire in 2017, which is the industry’s first passenger tire to achieve full replacement of petroleum based oil with SBO in the tread.

Traditional internal mixing techniques for natural rubber (NR) and silica leave room for improvement in achieving good polymer-filler interaction in TBR (truck and bus radial) tread compounds. Internal, solid phase mixing of NR polymer and precipitated silica is complicated by several factors.