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A novel experimental methodology is developed for the characterization of the vulcanization and foaming processes of an ethylene propylene diene (EPDM) cellular rubber and for establishing the relationship of its physical and mechanical property evolution with vulcanization and foaming process temperature. To establish this relationship, the vulcanization and foaming reaction kinetics and their coupling have been determined, as well as important parameters in the behavior of the material, such as conductivity, specific heat capacity and coefficients of expansion and foaming. This aforementioned strategy allows the setting of a material model that can be implemented into finite-element (FE) codes to reproduce the material changes during the vulcanization and foaming processes. The material model developed reproduces with enough accuracy the coupling of chemical kinetics of vulcanization and foaming reactions. The results provided by the numerical material model fit a similar trend, and values with an accuracy of 90–99% to those observed in the experiments conducted for the determination of the cellular rubber expansion in function of the temperature. Moreover, the cellular rubber expansion values agree with the structural analysis of vulcanized and foamed samples at different isothermal temperatures and with the proportional loss of mechanical properties in the function of the vulcanization and foaming degree.

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Surface texturing is an effective method to reduce friction without the need to change materials. In this study, surface textures were transferred to rubber samples in the form of dimples, using a novel laser surface texturing (LST)—based texturing during moulding (TDM) production process, developed within the European Project MouldTex. The rubber samples were used to experimentally determine texture-induced friction variations, although, due to the complexity of manufacturing, only a limited amount was available. The tribological friction measurements were hence combined with an artificial intelligence (AI) technique, i.e., Reduced Order Modelling (ROM). ROM allows obtaining a virtual representation of reality through a set of numerical strategies for problem simplification. The ROM model was created to predict the friction outcome under different operating conditions and to find optimised dimple parameters, i.e., depth, diameter and distance, for friction reduction. Moreover, the ROM model was used to evaluate the impact on friction when manufacturing deviations on dimple dimensions were observed. These results enable industrial producers to improve the quality of their products by finding optimised textures and controlling nominal surface texture tolerances prior to the rubber components production.