Affiliation:
1. 1Department of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee
Abstract
Abstract
The handling of raw elastomers in processing and fabricating equipment has been an important industrial operation for 150 years. It was an integral part of a sizable industry several decades before the molecular structure of rubber itself was realized or complex deformation-induced phase transitions and mechanochemical degradation reactions were thought to occur in these materials during processing. The rubber industry was already established when the classical organic chemical industries came into being and predates its sister plastics and synthetic fiber industries by three quarters of a century or more. It is ironic and rather unfortunate that the scientific study of rubber processing operations has been generally neglected while the basic processes of newer and sometimes smaller industries have received considerable attention, and even found their way into university engineering curricula. This is undoubtedly due to pecularities of the industry. Considerable amounts of fillers, oils, and other ingredients are added to rubber, which allow the rubber technologist to resolve processing problems through changing the (secret) composition of compounds rather than by scientific analysis. Certainly another reason is the polymer synthesis orientation (to some extent justified) of rubber industry research. During the years of the Rubber Reserve Program, when research was government supported and widely and openly publicized, there were considerable advances in knowledge of free radical homo-and copolymerization in solution and emulsion, but relatively little progress was made in the understanding of rubber rheology and processing.
Subject
Materials Chemistry,Polymers and Plastics
Cited by
42 articles.
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