Customer-Integrated Development – Creating Overall Optimized rCB Process Solutions

The production of rubber compounds for the tyre industry is an energy-intensive and CO2-emitting process. With the aim of becoming more sustainable, manufacturers are increasing their efforts to replace raw materials with a greater proportion of materials recovered from end-of-life tyres (ELTs).

The quality requirements of the final product are high. Thus, it takes intensive development efforts to bring such materials to the expected quality in a fine-tuned process. This applies in particular to recovered Carbon Black (rCB), which is difficult to process in its raw form and has to be granulated under specific conditions so that it can ultimately be fed into the tyre manufacturing process.

The in-house pilot center at NEUMAN & ESSER offers the opportunity to carry out necessary granulation tests under practical conditions. In these tests and with the support of process engineering experts, the assigned plant operator can vary the system parameters of the rCB treatment process and the choice of the suitable binder to determine the optimal rCB quality for the final material mixture.

On the basis of the result of the fine-tuning process of the individual system components and the optimization of the planned process parameters, an integrated system is designed prior to real-life implementation. In accordance with the high demands of the tyre industry, this ensures the delivery of high-quality rCB from an overall optimized solution built by a team of experts with extensive process technology know-how. Process integration is not just connecting system components.