Before looking at how to examine rubber quality, we need to comprehend what rubber quality means clearly. Ensuring that people work with the rubber’s right quality may best be defined as ensuring that the material or product you select most suits the application people require it to perform. Does it perform the right job when it is new, and would it keep giving an acceptable performance for the duration people want it to? People can divide this analysis into a couple of areas. One of the areas is whether the mechanical structure is correct, ensuring that the commodity is reliable and functional. The second one is that the rubber grade and type suit the conditions it would operate in.
Suppose the product’s structure is proven and strong, which we can measure before manufacturing by employing non-linear finite element analysis. In that case, we could start focusing on whether the quality of the rubber is appropriate for your commodity. To answer that query, we will need to know the rubber part’s operating environment, as this influences the choices people must make in terms of the kind of the polymer and standard of that polymer to give the service life and performance that people require within a particular budget. An important point to remember about the quality of the rubber is that it is not necessarily correct that the best grade, most costly material available would be the excellent solution. We advise that people aim to employ the most sustainable and cost-efficient solution for their use. It could often be a situation where a less costly and lower standard rubber would perfectly perform well to meet the service life and design requirements.
How Do We Examine The Quality Of Rubber?
Sometimes, businesses get rubber parts from other rubber suppliers that are underperforming or failing where they were acceptable. This could be resulted either from a transformation in the environment or operating conditions of their mixing mill or from a decreased rubber quality because of the change in the composition of the rubber or its production procedure utilized for the part. It could be tough to examine the quality of rubber on various finished components or analyze why parts start to fail when they have historically failed. Still, there are measures that people could take, which are below.
- Physical properties like tensile strength and hardness could be checked provided that the regulation shape and size could be developed.
- Soak testing could be done to test fluid resistance
- People can use a thermogravimetric procedure to examine the parts. This will help them recognize the chemical constituents destructively.
- Gas chromatography could, if required, offer different perceptions of the chemical constituents.
People do not need to routinely conduct laboratory tests on the rubber’s quality until an all-inclusive failure mode analysis is required after a comprehensive evaluation of the trackability in the supply chain has been carried out, along with a range of validations and process checks. Unluckily, it is effortless to give documents that do not represent a reality within an international supply chain. For safety-essential parts, trustworthy, reliable vendors and high-confidence procedures ensure that the commodity provided is as it must be and endures to fulfil your requirement. Rubber molding compounds could be affected where the supply chain has transformed the composition to encompass more significant proportions of less costly substances to produce the same rubber quality.
Rubber Testing Techniques
A rubber examining laboratory would carry one or more analytical and physical tests to guarantee that your rubber would give an expected performance, fulfil government needs and fulfil industry standards in their final form. The appropriate rubber tests would vary depending on the product’s end use and the testing objective. Maybe you are interested in checking for compliance with the industry standard. Perhaps you want to carry out research and development or quality assurance. Regardless of your purpose for substance examination, there is an exam or series of exams that rubber testing experts could carry to meet your challenge. Rubber testing experts employ rubber examining methods that emphasize temperature, wear and strength. By examining these factors, rubber testing experts can predict the rubber sample’s durability, life cycle, and ability to bear extreme temperature conditions.
Strength
Rubber testing experts can examine the quality of rubber by employing different tests, encompassing the durometer hardness test, moving to die rheometer, and oscillating/ automatic disc rheometer. They could also examine the rubber sample’s viscoelasticity with their Mooney Viscometer. Moving die rheometer exams and oscillating/ automation disc rheometer assess the rubber compounds’ vulcanization features. The oscillating/ automatic disc rheometer is an older rubber testing method that utilizes an oscillating disc cure meter. Often, its data works together with moving die rheometer data as a test to check quality. Durometer is the resistance of the material to permanent indentation. Conducting a durometer hardness test on cured rubber lets rubber testing experts assess the hardness of the rubber sample. We use an indentor to apply force to a sample under particular conditions and document the results, determining its hardness based on the behaviour of the sample.
Wear of rubber
Abrasion examination is a great tool to predict the wear properties of several materials, encompassing rubber. Rubber testing experts can assess the ability of the rubber sample to resist in a couple of ways. The first employs a rotary abrader, and the second uses a rotary turntable. When utilizing a rotary abrader to assess the ability of material wear, we equip the rotating drum with a rough media. Then, rubber testing experts evaluate the performance of your rubber by comparing the weight of its sample after and before running it in opposition to the rotary drum abrader. Rubber testing experts could also carry out abrasion exams with the help of a rotary turntable. This type of testing, known as tazber testing, employs a turntable to expose your rubber evenly to rough wheels over a specific number of cycles. Rubber testing experts can then assess the standardized wear index value, depth of wear, volume loss and weight loss of the rubber. The outcomes of abrasive exams are essential for quality control, research and development and comparative analysis.
