Lanxess claims that, this product features rebound resilience and particularly low heat buildup, making Buna CB 21 a product for cutting the rolling resistance of car tires, which saves fuel consumption. The reduction in fuel consumption, in turn, cuts down the discharge of CO2 and lowers the impact on environment.
Thomas Gross, rubber expert at Lanxess performance butadiene rubbers business unit, said: “Buna CB 21 enables us to meet the pressing need of many of our customers for a synthetic rubber with particularly good rebound resilience. After the positive feedback from the sampling for our trial product, we are now also ‘officially’ incorporating this rubber into our range. We are especially pleased that this coincides with the centenary of synthetic rubber and naturally we hope that Buna CB 21 will be one of the successes of the century.
“Thanks to our advanced production technology, our Nd-BR elastomers feature a particularly narrow molecular weight distribution. As a result, they contain relatively low proportions of lightweight plasticizing and heavy viscosity-enhancing molecules. We therefore don’t need to sacrifice good rebound values for solution viscosity levels that are too high. This enables us to bring onto the market a neodymium polybutadiene, Buna CB 21, that offers unique rebound resilience levels and extremely low heat buildup.”
The rebound resilience of a rubber is critical for rubber products subjected to dynamic loads. It is an indication of how economically an elastomer uses energy during deformation. High rebound resilience indicates that a rubber transfers a large proportion of the mechanical energy that is introduced, or releases this after loading, without converting it into heat and therefore wasting it.
Rubber molecules that are as long as possible and have a uniform length/molecular weight are ideal for high rebound values. This makes a material of this type suitable for achieving a further decrease in tire rolling resistance – essentially the proportion of drive energy converted into heat by rolling as a result of inevitable deformation – compared to products filled with silica, Lanxess said.
