Tire Rubber Melting Temperature

10 chassis tuning tricks using tire temperatures.

Tire rubber melting temperature.

107 124 349 polyethylene hd. Rubber begins to melt at approximately 180 degrees celsius. Tire temperatures are the easiest and most cost effective link you have to the action at the tire contact patch. Most modern shoe soles are not rubber as in natural latex based but are some form of plastic heat will melt most thermoform plastic but the problem will be making a suitable mould for the sole.

The rubber in tires is vulcanized meaning that is in fact one big molecule. It will not melt. The air pressure in tires increases as the temperature goes up. At low temperatures around 5 c to 6 c there is a risk that rubber hardens because of crystallization.

When heated to a high enough temperature in an inert atmosphere away from air oxygen the rubber will decompose sometimes partially resulting in an oily ooze. The rubber used in creating tires is a mixture of many compounds including carbon latex rosin and chalk hardened by the addition of sulfur and other compounds. It doesn t sound like much but there s typically only 30 35 psi in the tires of passenger vehicles. A common method is to chop the tires into half inch pieces and mix the pieces with liquid nitrogen at a temperature of minus 148 degrees fahrenheit minus 100 degrees celsius.

The optimum temperature for rubber is 20 c. At ambient temperature old tires can be turned into crumb rubber. 220 268 432 488 polyethylene ld. Melting points and ignition temperatures.

Using the tire temperatures effectively can pay considerable dividends on the race track and it s worth the effort to learn what they mean and how to adjust setups accordingly. Americans discard approximately 100 million tires every year which begs some type of recycling method to prevent overloading landfills. Pure rubber once vulcanised can not be melted or the tires on your car would melt under heavy braking.