The effect of a large amount of kaolin (China clay) on the viscosity, cure, hardness, Young’s modulus, tensile strength, elongation at break, stored energy density at break, tear energy and compression set resistance of some sulfur-cured natural rubber, polybutadiene rubber and ethylene-propylene-diene rubber composites was investigated. The kaolin surface had been pre-treated with 3-mercaptopropyltrimethoxysilane to improve its dispersion in the rubbers. For
natural rubber, the hardness and Young’s modulus improved, tensile strength and tear energy were unchanged and the remaining properties deteriorated when kaolin was added. The viscosity increased and the scorch and optimum
cure times decreased whilst the cure rate rose with kaolin. For polybutadiene rubber and ethylene-propylene-diene rubber, with the exception of the compression set resistance, all the properties including the viscosity gained from the kaolin. The kaolin was found to be extending or non-reinforcing filler for natural rubber, and highly reinforcing for polybutadiene rubber and EPDM. In addition, the scorch and optimum cure times and cure rate of polybutadiene rubber benefitted, whereas with the exception of the scorch time, the optimum cure time and cure rate of ethylene-propylenediene rubber were adversely affected by kaolin.
History
School
Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
Materials
Published in
Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites
Pages
1 - 14 (14)
Citation
SHEIKH, S.H. ... et al, 2017. The potential of kaolin as a reinforcing filler for rubber composites with new sulfur cure systems. Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites, 36(16), pp.1132-1145.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2017-04-24
Publication date
2017
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0731684417712070.