EVALUATING ETHYLENE PROPYLENE DIENE RUBBER FOR DYNAMIC APPLICATIONS INSTEAD OF NATURAL

Abstract

Natural Rubber (NR) has been used in dynamic applications for many years. NR has satisfactory resilience, vibration, and fatigue properties. Besides all these good properties, NR has quite poor aging resistance; also its service temperature is limited to about 90 °C. Improving aging characteristics of NR is a common problem for both rubber industry and academy. Nowadays, especially automotive industry has been focused on thermally resistant static and dynamic rubber based materials in new generation automobiles because of current strict emission regulations. There are a lot of attempts to improve service conditions of NR however; they are not comparable yet, with alternative saturated rubbers such as EPDM. In this study, a new grade EPDM, which had a high molecular weight, narrow molecular weight distribution, and tailor-made chain structure, has been studied in terms of rheological, mechanical, dynamic mechanical, aging, and low temperature properties for target dynamic applications. Especially possible service temperature and dynamic performance of EPDM were compared to that of NR based reference. It was concluded that, EPDM may be an assertive competitor to NR, if its chain structure is modified correctly.