At a time when natural resources are becoming ever scarcer, the efficiency with which our vehicles transfer the engine’s propulsion energy to the road plays an increasingly important role tyres, which serve as the link between the engine and the asphalt, naturally play a key part. On freeways, tyres currently account for around a fifth of fuel consumption, and in urban traffic, this figure can be as high as 30 percent.
Specialty chemicals company LANXESS, a pioneer in the field of synthetic rubber, already markets rubber raw materials that can substantially reduce these figures. Examples include new grades of butyl rubber (IIR), modified solution styrene-butadiene rubber (SSBR) and advanced neodymium-polybutadiene rubber (Nd-BR).
“Developing new grades of tyre rubber that help save energy but at the same time offer an equally high level of safety is a task for experienced chemists,” says Christoph Kalla, head of Marketing & Research in the Performance Butadiene Rubbers business unit at LANXESS, “because some of the key properties of a tyre are very difficult to optimize without impairing others.
For example, it used to be a big problem to improve rolling resistance – a measure of the energy loss through the tyre – without impairing abrasion resistance and wet grip. Thanks among other things to our many years of experience in this sector, rubber chemists have nevertheless made very good progress towards “squaring the circle”. We anticipate that the rolling resistance of the next tyre generation can be lowered by up to 10 percent merely by using currently available high-performance grades of tyre rubber. Naturally without having to make any compromises on vehicle safety – quite the opposite in fact!”
