With references -With summary in English and Dutch.Copy right © Ernest Cichomski, 2015.All right reserved.
Cover design by Ernest CichomskiPrinted by Print Partners Ipskamp, P.O. Box 333, 7500 AH Enschede, the Netherlands. Researchers at I. G. Farben, a German conglomerate that included Bayer, focused on the sodium polymerization of the monomer butadiene to produce a synthetic rubber called "Buna" ("bu" for butadiene and "na" for natrium, the chemical symbol for sodium).
SILICA-SILANE REINFORCED PASSENGER CAR TIRE TREADS
2The brake-trough came with the discovery in 1929 that Buna S (butadiene and styrene randomly co-polymerized in emulsion), when compounded with carbon black, was significantly more durable than natural rubber.Carbon black can be considered as a one of the oldest manufactured products and its usage as a pigment of India inks and mural paints can be traced back to the ancient Chinese and Egyptians. The most important event which had the greatest influence on the usage of carbon black occurred at the beginning of the former century and involved the discovery of the reinforcing effect of carbon blacks when added to natural rubber, a discovery that was to become one of the most significant milestones in the rubber and automotive industry. By using carbon black as a reinforcing filler the service life of a tire was greatly increased, ultimately making it possible to achieve a range of several ten thousand kilometers.
3Since the early nineteen-forties, carbon blacks have been complemented by the group of highly active silicas. Technological reasons have long prevented silicas from being used in tire compounds. Conventionally, carbon black is considered to be a more effective reinforcing filler for rubber tire treads than silica, if the silica is used without a coupling agent. In comparison with carbon black there tends to be a lack of, or at least an insufficient degree of physical and/or chemical bonding between the silica particles and the rubber. This is necessary to enable the silica to become a reinforcing filler for the rubber for most purposes, including tire treads. To overcome such deficiencies, additives capable of reacting with both the silica surface and the rubber molecules, generally known as coupling agents became a necessity during compounding 4 . Silica offers several advantages over carbon black. In tire treads, silica yields a comparable wear resistance and better wet grip in combination with a lower rolling resistance than carbon black when used in combination with a coupling agent 5,6 .Since rubber and carbon black are both hydrophobic substances, problems rarely arise when the two are mixed. When silica is mixed however with the commonly used non-polar, olefinic hydrocarbon rubbers, there will be a greater occurrence of hydrogenbond interactions between surface silanol groups in silica agglomerates than of interactions between polar siloxane or silanol groups and the rubber, so mixing silica with rubber involves major problems 7 . For this reason there is great intere...