Curing of Natural Rubber/Polyvinyl Alcohol Blends Using Glutaraldehyde

Abstract

According to our previous work, a novel method to vulcanize natural rubber (NR) at low temperature (below 50 °C) has been introduced using Glutaraldehyde (GA) as a curing agent. The mechanical property of GA cured NR was found to be low. It can be improved by blending NR with suitable thermoplastics. The main objective of this work is to improve the mechanical properties of this cured system. Effect of blend composition of Natural Rubber/Polyvinyl Alcohol (NR/PVA) on the properties is investigated. It is found that the mechanical properties increased with increasing PVA content. The results suggested that the blend with NR/PVA (90/10) is the most appropriate combination among the other blend compositions, which exhibits better mechanical properties. The blend NR/PVA cured using the new vulcanization technique has also been compared with cured NR without PVA and Thailand Industrial Standard (TIS) for making rubber flooring sheet. Furthermore, the resulting materials from this technique has been tried to apply on the surface of cement using energy from sunlight (∼40 °C). It is seen that, cured NR/PVA blends provide a good tacking and forming on the substrate materials. Processing at low temperature and cost effectiveness are the main advantages of this investigation. Therefore, it can be effectively applied for various industrial applications.