Feb 14, 2017
Production of automobile tires can not be called environmentally friendly. The main raw material for tires is a synthetic rubber, the receipt of which is associated with the processing of oil. But now scientists have found a way to use as a key component of tires vegetable matter, which reportedly does not affect the appearance and characteristics of the rubber.
The main element of natural rubber - isoprene. On the basis of its polymer obtained from one species and synthetic rubber. It is in the process of modernization and became a team of researchers led by Paul Dauenhauerom (Paul Dauenhauer) from the University of Minnesota.
One major industrial methods for producing isoprene is cracking - high-temperature refining, in which the carbon bonds are broken in hydrocarbons and is formed with a plurality of compounds of lower molecular weight, in other words, the shorter. This is followed by the process of separation and purification of fragments, and then polymerized isoprene, i.e. a build longer chains. In the future for rubber polymer undergoes another classical process - vulkanizizatsiyu (literally crosslinking bridges across long strands of sulfur atoms). From the resulting material are made tires and much more.
The possibility of avoiding refining towards using any biomass is haunted by tire manufacturers over the last few years. Isoprene has repeatedly tried to obtain a purer way from natural sources such as plant sugars. But the developed methods were not good enough to meet the huge demand of the world in the rubber industry.
The new technology takes over as the basis of sugar derived from grasses, trees, and corn. Researchers have proposed a hybrid three-step process that combines biomass processing with the help of enzymes produced by microorganisms, and catalytic processing, similar to the same step when using oil as a raw material.
Scientists from the US have developed a bio-isoprene for the production of tires
The first step is a microbial fermentation of sugars derived from biomass, to the so-called itaconic acid. At the second stage, it reacts with hydrogen to form a compound of the following chemical name with the difficult methyltetrahydrofuran (methyl-THF). The secret to the effectiveness of this stage is the use of a unique high-performance metal catalyst.
But the real technological breakthrough was committed in a third step, which was the dehydration of methyl-THF (elimination of water) to give isoprene. Here, as the phosphorus zeolite catalysts were used, including the recently developed at the University of Minnesota catalyst called P-SPP. Their action has a narrow directivity, namely, has a 90 percent selectivity to dienes - compounds which include isoprene. And on the last 70 percent of this figure.
"The performance of zeolite catalysts was amazing - says Dauenhauer in a university news release -. This new class of solid acid catalysts having improved catalytic activity and is the main reason that the use of renewable raw materials to produce isoprene possible."
As a result of development, researchers published a paper in the journal ACS Catalysis and issued patent.
The authors hope that their technology can be quite competitive and readily available renewable biological sources of raw materials show the potential for expansion of domestic production not only tires, but also other products made of synthetic rubber.