Recycling of Waste Tyre into Silica-Rubber Compounds for Green Tyre Application

Abstract The prevention of detrimental effects to environment, owing to generation of a huge amount of rubber wastes, is a big challenge across the globe that warrants a thorough investigation of recycling and reuses waste of rubber products. In this spirit a sustainable development of a devulcanization process along with the production of value added devulcanized rubber is a task of hours. The present work describes a simultaneous devulcanization and chemical functionalisation process of waste solution styrene butadiene rubber (S-SBR). This kind of rubber is generally used as the main polymer component in silica filled tread rubber compounds for high-performance passenger car tyres. As-grown ethoxy groups on the functionalized devulcanized styrene butadiene rubber (D-SBR) are exploited for the coupling between silica and the devulcanized rubber chains. We compare the mechanical and dynamic mechanical performance of D-SBR with that of virgin SBR control composites. Covalently bonding interfaces developed from the pendent ethoxy groups of D-SBR and silanol groups on the silica surface offer a competitive and promising performance of the D-SBR based composites. We conclude that the present approach can be further utilized for the large-scale production of different rubber products with satisfied elastomeric performance.