Traditionally, one of the biggest issues facing the automotive and transportation ecosystem
has been what to do with scrap tires. When they are no longer suitable for use on vehicles
because of wear or irreparable damage, used tires can become a huge health and
environmental problem.
The benefit of similar practices for recycling scrap tires in different regions of the world is uniformity and a standard of quality for the end products. If the various components of tires (steel, nylon, and rubber mix (natural and synthetic rubber and silica)) can be recovered, then the quality of the output can be checked through testing coupons as per ASTM (the American Society of Testing and Materials).
The mechanics of finite element analysis (FEA) regarding elastomers (or rubberlike
materials) and foams apply to the FEA of glass, plastics, and biomaterials as well. The
concepts are not only valuable to practitioners in the rubber and tire industries but also to
those involved in:
Process simulation uses models that introduce approximations and assumptions but allow the description of a property over a wide range of temperatures and pressures, which might be non-covered by available real data. Models also allow interpolation and extrapolation – within certain limits – and enable the search for conditions outside the range of known properties.
Recycling is the process of converting post-industrial and post-consumer wastes into new materials and objects. Still, this concept is often coined to the recovery of energy from wastes (sadly, as a fraction only of the energy in remaking the wasted material or product). The recyclability of a material depends on its ability to reacquire the properties it had in its original state. It is an alternative to “conventional” waste disposal that can save materials and help lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from having to replace the scraped goods. It can also prevent the waste of potentially useful materials and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reducing energy uses, air pollution (from incineration), and water contamination (from landfilling leakages).
On January 28, 1986, at 5:39 p.m., 73 seconds after takeoff within NASA’s STS-51-L mission and at a height of 14.6 kilometers, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated in mid- air and its seven crewmembers, among the cream of the crop scientists in the country, died, giving rise to one of the saddest representative images of the last century.
Simulation is an imitative representation of a process or system that could exist in the real world. In this broad sense, simulation can often be used interchangeably with model. Sometimes a clear distinction between the two terms is made, in which simulations require the use of models; the model represents key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the simulation represents the evolution of the model over time. Another way to distinguish between the terms is to define simulation as experimentation with the help of a model. This definition includes time-independent simulations, using computers.
For most products, tooling is expensive and requires considerable lead time. Simulating its performance before cutting steel saves considerable time and expenditures that otherwise fall under adjustments.
Finite Element Analysis or FEA is a numerical technology that when applied to developing a rubber or plastic product allows to virtually simulate its performance prior to tooling and testing.
Every car scraps a tire a year on average. Strategies to cater to such a huge and growing waste stream consisting of incineration, crumb rubber generation, and landfilling, are not effective.
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