Rolling resistance is a key tire property considered in the design and manufacturing of tires. While rolling resistance is mainly controlled by the micro- and macrostructure of the elastomer and the compounding of the tread material, it is usually measured by an expensive quantitative tire test using a prototype final product. In order to speed up the development of new tires, efforts have been made to predict rolling resistance using samples rather than prototype tires. One such attempt is to correlate the mechanical loss factor tan(#delta#) to rolling resistance. However, this method is quite empirical and not useful if the influence of factors like polymer structure or filler on the rolling resistance is of interest. Especially for silica filled compounds or hybrid systems (compounds with silica and carbon black fillers) the correlation of rolling resistance with the loss factor is not possible. Combining dynamic mechanical measurements with the mastercurve technique and the separation and modeling of molecular relaxation processes yields an improved technique for predicting the rolling resistance.
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