Webinar: Green Tire Chemistry – Optimizing the Tire Magic Triangle through Tread Chemistry
March 27, 2025 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Dating back nearly 40 years, the demand to improve fuel efficiency while maintaining tire traction and reducing treadwear continues to be a trend for tire manufacturers. This has become even more critical as electric vehicles have rapidly entered the market.
New, performance-enhancing materials have impacted tire tread performance, including elastomers (rubbers), process oils, performance resins, precipitated silica and organosilanes. The objective of this webinar is to review and explain the use of passenger car tire tread materials that successfully expand the magic triangle of tire performance. The following topics will be covered:
- Usage of green materials in tire compounding
- Considerations for mixing techniques
- Common material properties tests used to correlate to tire performance
- Trends, applications and what to consider when using performance-enhancing materials.
Price: Free for Members / $99 Non-members
Instructor: Critt Ohlemacher, PhD, Smithers Senior Materials Scientist – Akron Labs
Bio: As the Senior Materials Scientist of the Smithers rubber and polymer testing laboratory in Akron, Ohio, Critt works with the chemical analysis and physical & mechanical properties testing teams on projects related to mixing and compounding, reconstruction and reverse engineering, and development of analytical techniques. Critt has over thirty years of experience in physical testing and chemical analysis of rubber and polymer materials. He has special expertise in reverse engineering of elastomers and plastics, bloom and inclusion identification, additive identification and quantitation, headspace analysis and compounding. Critt holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Ohio University and a Doctor of Philosophy in polymer science from the University of Akron.