TABLE OF CONTENTS JAMES L. WHITE
Department of Polymer Engineering
University of Akron
Akron, Ohio
The fabrication of rubber parts generally involves the mixing and processing of bulk unvulcanized compounds and sometimes solutions and emulsions through complex equipment. The ease or difficulty of fabrication depends on how these rubber systems respond to applied stresses and deformations, their rheological (from rheos: to flow, and logos: science of ) properties. It is the purpose of this chapter to describe both rheological properties and the processing of unvulcanized elastomers and their compounds. We also consider some of the implications of rheology for processing. The subject of this chapter, processing technology and engineering science, has been treated in much more detail in the author s book [W16].
The study of the rheological properties and processing of elastomers and their solutions and compounds dates to the origins of the industry in the 1820s. The patent literature, memoirs, and reviews of the early 19th century contain numerous discussions of the flow and fabrication of natural rubber and gutta percha [B17, B29, C6, C7, G12 14, H4 11]. The fundamental properties and methods of processing rubber are associated with Thomas Hancock, Charles Macintosh, Edwin Chaffee, Charles Goodyear, Richard Brooman, Charles Hancock, and others, many long forgotten. It was not, however, until the development of three-dimensional linear viscoelasticity by Ludwig Boltzmann [B26] at the University of Vienna in 1874 that the understanding of the rheological properties of rubbery materials became sophisticated enough to allow rational...
