A Comparative Study on the Characteristics of Crumb Rubber with Commercial Rubbers

There is abundant amount of polymeric materials produced and used every day. After their usage period, only little amount is being recycled or reused. The recycled polymeric material has several properties similar to or better than that of the virgin, and their usage as a final product is cost-effective. Among these materials, rubber is the most used especially in manufacturing of various tyres (light, medium and heavy tyres). Rubber can be recycled in several ways using mechanical and thermal means producing shredded rubber and fuels, respectively. In this investigation, crumb rubber which was obtained from tyre has been used. It was molded by compression under uniform temperature and pressure in form of a sheet and was then cut for different characterisation tests as per the standards. Mechanical properties such as tensile strength, hardness and flex fatigue test, resilience property using rebound resilience were tested and compared with the corresponding commercial rubbers like styrene butadiene rubber (SBR), butyl rubber (BR), and nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR). Surprisingly, crump rubber was found to have high hardness value with respect to the commercial rubbers.