What Makes a Good Golf Ball Makes a Good Tire

LANXESS has long touted the benefits of its unique series of neodymium catalyzed polybutadiene (NdBR) in dynamic rubber applications such as tires and golf balls. To date, it’s been mostly lab predictors which have been offered to customers as evidence of improved performance. LANXESS has correlated the benefits of its NdBR versus other BR types, back to its unique micro- and macro structure properties i.e. low vinyl content (0.5%), narrow molecular weight distribution and high linearity. (1) The benefits of NdBR been realized commercially for many years and tire labeling demands have spurred even further growth of this high performance product.

 At last year’s Fall ACS Rubber Division Conference, LANXESS and Acushnet showed the advantage of NdBR over NiBR, CoBR and LiBR in golf ball performance based on actual golf ball core data. (2) But beyond commonly used lab predictors in the tire industry such as tan d @ 60°C, tan d max values in dependence of the strain and rebound @ 60 °C for improved rolling resistance, tan d  @ 0°C for  wet traction and DIN, little direct evidence has been offered to date to customers by means of tire test data.

 This presentation will describe how passenger tires were built with compound tread stock prepared by LANXESS using various BR types including NdBRs, CoBR and LiBR from LANXESS vs competitor’s NiBR and NdBR. Tire test data will be provided including rolling resistance, wet and dry traction and abrasion. It will be shown that what makes a good golf ball generally makes a good tire too. Additionally, there will be some discussion of how modified NdBRs show improved processing while maintaining tire dynamic lab predictors.

 (1) J. Douglas, H. Kloppenburg, D. Hardy, T. Groß, N. Steinhauser, A. Lucassen, “High cis-1,4-BRs and SBRs to Meet Current and Future Tire Demands”, Paper 102, Presented at the Fall 178th Technical Meeting of the Rubber Division of the American Chemical Society, Inc. Milwaukee, WI, October 12-14, 2010

 (2) J. Douglas, B. Comeau, D. Goguen, D. Hardy_, H. Kloppenburg, Y. Zhang, T. Gross;  Paper 106; “High Performance Polybutadienes in Golf Balls”, Presented at the Fall 182nd Technical Meeting of the Rubber Division of the American Chemical Society, Inc., Cincinnati, OH , October 11-13, 2012.