No longer a secret science
The technological challenges rubber is faced with – in tires or toothed belts, for example – are growing all the time. As a result, complex rubber products for demanding tasks can scarcely be developed using “gut feeling” alone as they were in the past. For approximately 10 years now, Lanxess has therefore been offering the services of its Polymer Testing Center to external customers, too. LANXESS is now attaching increased importance to polymer analysis by integrating the Center, which was previously part of the High Performance elastomers business unit, into its Innovation & Technology group function.
“Cutting-edge rubber formulations are extremely complex multi-component systems whose development requires a great deal of experience,” says Professor Claus Wrana, head of the LANXESS Polymer Testing Laboratory in Leverkusen, Germany. “Over the past few decades, polymer physics has developed a series of methods that enable us to explain the properties of rubber products by looking at the molecular structure of their components. As a major rubber supplier and developer with strong research credentials, LANXESS has played a big part in that. We not only use this expertise internally for the further development of our own rubbers, we are also happy to pass it on to the rest of the industry,” says Wrana. “In so doing, we not only provide measurements, we also explicitly see ourselves as problem solvers, helping to tackle challenges using polymer physics.”
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