Rubber Processing

These processing aids consist of proprietary blends of rosin and tall oil along with pine tars. Other specialty products many of which are based on rosins and tall oils are also consumed by manufacturers of belting, mechanical rubber goods, rubber mats, tubing, and other unique applications. Today, the use of this renewable and sustainable family of chemicals is key for manufacturers to meet their sustainability and carbon-neutral goals.

It has been long recognized that rosin-based products are excellent components in rubber processing. When used as tackifiers, significant cost savings are realized compared to petroleum products and Phenolic resins. It has been demonstrated in the laboratory as well as production, that combinations of rosins and rosin oil blends along with Phenolic resins provide cost-effective tackifying systems in rubber formulations while maintaining superior physical characteristics of the finished rubber. Rosin-based blends offer more stable pricing and availability than petroleum-based materials and Phenolic resins.

In years past, rosin-based tackifiers were traditionally controlled to sets of physical specifications. These tackifiers played an effective part in their role of controlling costs while performing satisfactorily.

As quality considerations became more demanding, it was concluded that the pine tars and rosin blends lacked the identifiability, uniformity, and predictability consumers wanted. Tack variation also was a main focal point of concern.

Pine tars, rosins, and rosin oils when used in large volumes years ago were all thought to produce tack variation in production. For this reason, a trend developed towards using more petroleum-based products and Phenolic resins. Substantial time, effort, and money were spent on the evaluation of the pine family of intermediate raw materials to investigate how they could be improved upon while still offering a lower-cost alternative to Phenolic resin tackifiers.

The research and development program revealed that strictly controlling the CHEMICAL content, as well as the PHYSICAL specification brought a dramatic change in the performance of the materials being used, along with the most important thing, namely, the uniformity and predictability of rosin-based blends used as tackifiers. In some cases, these proprietary blends even replaced Phenolic resins totally. The absolute control of rosin acids and fatty acids with rigid plus or minus deviations gave excellent performance and cost benefits.

To identify the specific chemicals, which made up these highly complex blends, the use of modern, sophisticated equipment became commonplace. Such procedures as gas chromatography, gel permeation chromatography, high-pressure liquid chromatography, differential thermal analysis and atomic absorption have been widely used. They have enabled Mobile Rosin Oil to specifically identify chemical components and meticulously control all production materials to a very strict chemical makeup with unparalleled quality. In turn, manufacturers who utilized materials produced in such a manner can count on consistent performance by utilizing the highest quality products at the lowest possible cost.

During the 1990s, the rosin blends family of tackifiers made a dramatic comeback in rubber formulations and exhibited uniformity and predictability at the moderate cost levels needed to offset many higher-cost tackifiers. In fact, data is available that shows combinations of rosin and tall oil blends with a Phenolic give superior performance than Phenolic alone.

It is also important to understand that our family of rubber processing aids is our primary product. Competitive materials offered, comprise secondary, even tertiary by-products which "Just happen" to conform to given sets of specifications.

Although the rubber reclaiming market technology in the United States has changed significantly, many areas of the world still utilize the older, more economical methods of recovery. Rubber softeners and peptizing agents are routinely produced by Mobile Rosin Oil and exported to users around the world for use in reclaiming rubber.