Natural Rubber Blends with Biopolymers

Natural rubber based-blends and IPNs have been developed to improve the physical and chemical properties of conventional natural rubber for applications in many industrial products. They can provide different materials that express various improved properties by blending with several types of polymer such as thermoplastics, thermosets, synthetic rubbers, and biopolymers, and may also adding some compatibilizers. However, the level of these blends also directly affects their mechanical and viscoelastic properties. The mechanical properties of these polymer blended materials can be determined by several mechanical instruments such as tensile machine and Shore durometer. In addition, the viscoelastic properties can mostly be determined by some thermal analyser such as dynamic mechanical thermal analysis and dynamic mechanical analysis to provide the glass transition temperature values of polymer blends. For most of these natural rubber blends and IPNs, increasing the level of polymer and compatibilizer blends resulted in an increase of the mechanical properties until reached an optimum level, and then their values decreased. On the other hand, the viscoelastic behaviours mainly depended on the intermolecular forces of each material blend that can be used to investigate the miscibility of them. Therefore, the natural rubber blends and IPNs with different components should be specifically investigated in their mechanical and viscoelastic properties to obtain the optimum blended materials for use in several applications. 

Biopolymers are biodegradable and environmentally friendly polymers. They can be classified into four types, i.e. sugar, starch, cellulose, and synthetic biomaterials. The blending of natural rubber with biopolymers has been attractive and has created considerable interest in industry and academically for developing biodegradable materials of polymer blends at a reasonable cost and with appropriately combined properties of both the natural rubber and the other biopolymers. In addition, biopolymers possess generally useful properties... 

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