Please tell us a little about your role at the company.
I work as the senior technical advisor for tire and technical rubber industries within the technical development and market support department at Nynas. I need to have an in-depth understanding of the technical aspects and needs of the industry in order to offer the best support to our customers.
What is the background to your presentation at Tire Technology Expo 2016?
As we are a global supplier of rubber process oils to the tire industry, naturally, understanding the role they play in a compound is of particular interest for us. Until recently, our investigations were of a more traditional character, focusing on the impact of different tire oils on the rubber performance in a given formulation. While this has provided very valuable information to us and the market in general, in our most recent study we wanted to expand the scope and use a multivariate approach to understand and identify the impact of individual components on a compound’s properties.
What parameters did you look at?
In a multivariate analysis approach we studied the impact of key components of a rubber compound, such as the loading of polymer, filler, processing additives, resin and, last but not least, the tire oil on the final compound properties. By this approach we could verify what parameters would have the highest impact for any given property, which gives the formulator an excellent tool to engineer a compound to desired specifications.
Why is this important for the industry?
For one thing, we hope to share with the industry our experience in analyzing compound properties when a key component is changed, which would lead to a higher understanding of the outcome and hence to more informed conclusions. Additionally, this approach would increase the efficiency of the R&D work to design a compound to reach target properties.
Where do you hope to take this research next?
For us, this is just a first step to this direction, but one that has shown to be quite promising. As always, there are also a few questions we want to explore further, but I’m sure we will continue to use this approach to investigate the impact of the tire oil and fine-tuning of compound properties.
February 4, 2016
