About Rubber

Intelligent design is one of the new development directions of synthetic polymer materials, and it is at the forefront of the development of synthetic rubber technology. The core concept of intelligent design is to introduce the idea of ​​”tailoring” in life into the field of polymerization of polymer materials.

In short, the performance of several different types of rubber is aggregated together by aggregation, resulting in new materials with sensing, judgment, processing and ordering functions. They inherit the original characteristics of the participating components, but differ from the simple overlay. In this way, with the help of human intelligence, according to the designer’s subjective requirements, to obtain new synthetic rubber varieties, the performance of several maternal concentrates on a new type of rubber, and these properties may have contradicted each other. But now they can be safe and sound, and each has their own duties.

The most typical example is the coexistence of the two opposite properties of “high (tire/ground) grip” and “low rolling resistance” in the same glue. This new type of rubber has not only been published, but has been successfully Applied to tires.

It is an integrated rubber SIBS (its molecular chain contains three segments of polystyrene, polybutadiene and polyisoprene). It is reasonable to say that the three synthetic rubbers of butadiene rubber, isoprene rubber and styrene-butadiene rubber can achieve similar purposes by mechanical blending, but the effect is much worse, and the result cannot be compared. Because from a technical point of view, the gap between the two lies in the following aspects.

1 The dispersion uniformity of several kinds of raw rubber after mechanical blending can only reach the macro level, while the integrated rubber SIBS can reach the microscopic level, and each participating component can maintain its own optimal value. In short, the two effects are not the same.

2 Blending requires power, consuming equipment, labor and time, while SIBS is in one step, reflecting economic benefits.

3 More importantly, from a technical point of view, the performance after blending can only reach the optimum level of each participating component at the same time.

In summary, any intelligently designed integrated rubber is indeed different from the blended rubber in that it can bond different microstructures to the same macromolecular chain, thereby overcoming the performance uniformity that cannot be achieved by mechanical blending. .

The emergence of integrated rubber SIES is a result of the intelligent design of polymer elastomers, and both Germany and the United States have achieved commercial production in this respect. It is estimated that this technology may be extended to more varieties in the future.

Integrated rubber is only one aspect of the advancement of synthetic polymer intelligence, and another aspect worth noting is the emergence of elastomers with memory functions. They provide different properties under different environmental conditions. The specific elastic and rigid components are copolymerized under the guidance of intelligent design to impart unique elasticity, rigidity and rigidity to elasticity after temperature change. The reversible recovery function thus obtains a shape memory material.

Low cis polybutadiene is a kind of polybutadiene, and it is also one of the follow-up varieties after the successful development of butadiene rubber (the subsequent varieties include vinylidene polybutadiene, rare earth butadiene rubber, etc.). FIRESTONE is a pioneer in this field. It was developed successfully with the butyl lithium catalyst system in the 1960s. After that, Japan’s Asahi Company and the British international synthetic rubber company also started production. The current annual production capacity of the world is over 400,000 tons.