Page 48 - The Tyreman V45 2014-3
P. 48
According to Low Kian Beng, Managing Director of SRIT, SRIT was very honoured to be selected by MRB for this R&D Collaboration. He believed that SRIT was ready to play its role as it was currently build- ing a new rubber mixing plant, consisting of the latest state-of-the-art machinery from Germany, which would upgrade SRIT’s technological - ing capacity to more than 20,000 tonnes per year. In addition, SRIT had also entered into an agreement with Kraiburg of Germany, to car- ry out joint development work in tyre retreads for various applications.
There are two grades of Ekoprena – Ekoprena 25 and Ekoprena 56. The main difference between the two, explained Dr Salmiah, was the level of epoxidation of polymer backbone in natural rubber. Ekoprena - ings since the early development of epoxidised natural rubber.
The current output of Ekoprena is 125 tonnes per month and Felda would increase the capacity to 500 tonnes by September 2014. At the moment, more than 90 per cent of Ekoprena’s production was exported to various countries, including Japan, USA, Germany, Italy, UK, Turkey, China and Korea.
In terms of commercial viability, Dr Salmiah said, MRB was expected to show the commercial viability through the collaboration with SRIT commercial-scale road trials.
“To support and promote the retreading industry and safety of re- treads, MRB has developed a strategy to establish Malaysia as a hub for green tyre retreading. The key approaches being adopted by MRB are priority research in green tyres, and collaborative pro- grammes with tyre retreaders and commercial users such as Prasara- na Berhad as well as with Malaysia Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS),”she added.
Under the agreement, SRIT would conduct pilot and large scale pro- duction of tyre tread compound based on Ekoprena and other rubbers to produce NR-based retreads, including Ekoprena, either by hot-feed or cold feed extrusion process. It would also build the tyres from the tread compound based on Ekoprena and other rubbers as well as to carry out road trails on the retreaded tyres built from the Ekoprena retreading using their facilities.
Retread Tyre’ - as in Malaysia, a good new TBR tyre was retreaded twice on average. As retreaded tyres used much less fossil fuel to produce as compared to a new tyre, the wide use of retreads by cus- tomers in itself was already doing the society a good deed by reducing the carbon footprint. Since new TBR tyres would need to be green in future, it would be good if reteads were also green, so that all tyres on the road would be green for sustainable economic development.
46 tyreman 2014/3
