Goodyear Tyre Rubber

In 1921, C. W. Bedford, at Rubber Services Laboratories Co., L. B. Sebrell, for Goodyear Tyre Rubber, both in the US, and Bruni and Romani at Pirelli, in Italy, developed mercaptobenzothiazole (MBT) (97) as an organic accelerator. In 1931, Bayer converted mercaptobenzothiazole into sulfenamides, that contain the grouping =CSNR2. These later became the most important class of accelerators. 

Natural rubber can be considered as a prehistoric polymer , since it was used around 1600 bc to make balls by Manati Indians in the country that is now Mexico. Further, natural rubber was used for waterproofing boots and clothes. Natural rubber is runny and sticky when the temperature is hot, but it becomes stiff and brittle when the temperature is cold enough. In 1839, Goodyear found a way to improve rubber resistance to a larger range of temperatures by a process in which sulphur was used - vulcanisation. This finding led to the development of the rubber industry, especially for tyres. 

Recently Novamont (Novara, Italy), working in partnership with Goodyear Tire and Rubber, has developed tyres using nanoparticles derived from com... 

The sort of droplet-like structure developed by Novamont (Figure 8.5) is easily dispersible in rubbers and allows a decrease of hysteresis in the final rubber compositions, which is useful for low rolling resistance treads in tyres. The first industrial application in this field was made by Goodyear in 2001, when the Biotread GT3 tyre was launched in Europe [132-136]. 

Natural rubber, as extracted from a tree, flows under its own weight (albeit slowly) and as such it is not very useful. However, Charles Goodyear discovered in 1839 that it can be vulcanized, by adding sulphur and heating. This material has the properties we are familiar with in car tyres etc. i.e. it is elastic and does not flow under normal conditions. Vulcanization corresponds to the crosslinking of polyisoprene chains by sulphur atoms (Goodyear was not aware of the molecular mechanism). This process is sketched in Fig. 2.27. Natural rubber is predominantly ds-1,4-polyisoprene (Fig. 2.9). Although synthetic rubbers have been developed (especially copolymers of polystyrene and polybutadiene), natural rubber is still very widely used due to its excellent properties as an elastomer and its ready availability. 

---