Studies on dynamic ageing conditions for Life Cycle Prediction of tyre tread

Abstract

Rubber material properties and useful life estimation are very important in design procedure to assure the safety and reliability of tire. The Tire tread compound undergo various stringent condition during its application like strain, temperature etc. In general Arrhenius techniques have been used to predict the life of rubber component using static ageing technique. But such techniques shall not reveal actual use of the application. An attempt has been made to simulate thermal ageing along with dynamic condition in order to match with actual application. Testing equipment has been designed and fabricated to suit this requirement of dynamic ageing of dumbbell specimens which closely matches with the real application. Study also deals with determining the changes in physical properties of tire rubber vulcanizates under different dynamic heat ageing condition and thereby predicting life of component. Mixing was carried out in open mill and compounded rubber was vulcanized by compression molding at 160°C based as per rheometric studies. Physico-mechanical and other properties were determined as per requirement for tread rubber compounds. Morphological studies of the fracture samples were done using SEM to study the changes if any, in the micro structure failure. Accelerated heat aging tests under dynamic condition were carried out to predict the life of tire rubber vulcanizates using Arrhenius technique which predicted the life of rubber vulcanizates of 17.01 days for threshold value and activation energy found to be 197.56kJ/mol.