Service Life Prediction of Natural Rubber/Reclaimed Rubber Blends through Thermogravimetric Analysis

The rubber products containing reclaimed rubber may have influenced the service life due to their prior degradation history. However, not many rubber compounders know their service life until they have used it for a certain period. This study breaks this barrier by proposing a simple, cost-effective prediction method based on thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). It focused on blends of Natural Rubber (NR) and Reclaimed Rubber (RR) at various blending ratios. The Ozawa–Flynn–Wall (OFW) Method was applied to the TGA outputs. The results showed that NR/RR blends at all ratios had slightly lower lifetimes than virgin NR over the temperature range of 30-600 °C. When considering a service temperature of 70 °C, the use of RR at 50 phr could reduce the service life from 195 years to 2.01 years. This indicates that the addition of RR may severely affect the service life of the products. The results of this study are useful information for rubber compounders when using RR in their formulations.