Technical area
Historical outlines on rubber
The first news that we have regarding rubber in Europe date back to the
beginning of the XVI century, when some Spaniards returning from the “New World”
refer to a substance that the natives obtained from a plant
that grew in the rain forests: the caoutchouc.
This
substance did not immediately find a use in production in Europe, it was
too difficult to work and too sensitive to variations in
temperature; it had not yet shown its special capabilities. It was not
until the beginning of the 1800s that the large-scale utilisation of natural
rubber that was imported from the plantations of South America began.
Its
principal use became the preparation of impermeable garments;
it had in fact been discovered that carbon naphtha had the property of
dissolving the rubber, so that it could be spread. Impermeable fabrics were
realised by applying a layer of rubber between two layers of fabric.
Towards the middle of the XIX century a procedure was discovered by the
Englishman Thomas Hancock that would change the history of
rubber: mastication. Mastication involved the tearing
of blocks of raw rubber by means of organs equipped with
points. The product obtained in this manner was much easier to
work than raw rubber. A few years later, the process known as “vulcanisation”
was discovered; vulcanisation confers greater stability to thermal variations to
the rubber, allowing it to conserve its characteristics for a wider interval of
temperatures.
The first vulcanisation processes involved the immersion
of masticated rubber leaves in baths of melted sulphur. The perfecting of these
new processing systems lead to the birth of the rubber
industry, which developed rapidly in the second half of the XIX
century.
The studies on the nature of rubber that scientists
carried out in ’800, the discovery of its empirical formula and the composition
of its molecular chain, were the basis that lead to the realisation of
the first synthetic rubbers that appeared at the beginning of
the XX century.
The production of synthetic rubber begins with the
gleaning of a base monomer from which the rubber for polymerisation is obtained.
In 1910, some Russian chemists had already synthesised polybutadiene, giving
rise to the birth of the Soviet synthetic rubber industry, one of the most
important at the beginning of the century. At the same time in Germany, methylic
rubber began to be synthesised and produced, and a few years later so was rubber
based on styrene and butadiene copolymers. With the beginning of the first
synthetic rubber production industries in the United States, its use reached
world proportions, affecting the domination that natural rubber had had until
then. Oils, carbon and other additives were added to synthetic rubbers with the
aim of making them even easier to process and in order to obtain types of rubber
suitable for new and complex uses. The advantages of synthetic rubber as
compared to natural rubber were essentially represented by the greater level of
purity and greater workability with respect to a product of vegetable origin
with variable grades of purity and changing chemical and physical
characteristics, linked to the region of origin and the period of production.
With the influence of synthetic rubber, natural rubber also improved
qualitatively and quantitatively, thanks to the use of technology created for
the production of their synthetic counterparts. A very important step for the
diffusion of rubber took place midway through the XX century, when Du Pont put
the first Fluorocarbon rubber on the market, with the Viton trade mark.
Due to its characteristics of high resistance to physical stress and
chemical aggression, fluorocarbon rubber is still a product that is very much in
use today for the realisation of elements in moulded rubber,
and in particular for the realisation of gaskets. Our company name,
‘Fluorgum’ comes from fluoridated rubber. Today, thanks to enormous
developments in rubber technology, we have at our disposal a huge quantity of
compounds to use for the realisation of products of any form, suitable for all
applications, from biomedicine to aerospace.
Visualize in detail the
Principal table of the compounds