Researchers find synthetic rubber that can outperform natural rubber

Natural rubber from rubber trees is a raw material with a limited supply, and synthetically produced rubber has not yet been able to match the abrasion behaviour of the natural product, rendering it unsuitable for truck tyres.

However, for the first time, a new type of synthetic rubber has been developed that achieves 30 to 50 per cent less abrasion than natural rubber.

The synthetic rubber is called BISYKA, a German abbreviation for biomimetic synthetic rubber, and has been developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Polymer Research.

Dr Ulrich Wendler, from the Fraunhofer Pilot Plant Center for Polymer Synthesis and Processing, said: “BISYKA actually has superior characteristics to rubber. Tyres made of synthetic rubber lose 30 per cent less mass than equivalent tyres made of natural rubber.”

“On top of that, the synthetic tyres have only half the tread loss. Furthermore, the synthetic rubber offers an excellent alternative to natural rubber, including the domain of high-performance truck tyres.”

Researchers found the alternative to natural rubber by investigating rubber from dandelions.

Like the rubber from rubber trees, 95 per cent of dandelion rubber consists of polyisoprene, while the remaining percentage is made up from organic components.

The advantage of dandelion rubber over tree rubber is that the former has a generation succession of every three months as opposed to seven years for the latter, which makes rubber from dandelions an ideal starting point for investigating the influence components on the rubber characteristics.

Wendler said: “So far, we have only carried out initial tests with the BISYKA tyre blend, but them are extremely promising. As the next step, we want to further optimise the BISYKA rubber. This concerns above all the proportion and the composition for truck tyres to the new rubber.”