What is Rubber?

Rubber material has been use extensively in our lives, occasionally we take granted for its importance to mankind. For example, tyre, rubber bands or even condom! Have you ever thought where is the rubber come from?

Rubber comes from two critical resources is naturally or synthetically. This simply means there are natural rubber and synthetic rubber in the market that we can choose from. Why do we need synthetic rubber when we have natural rubber? Synthetic rubber was first invented during the World War II where the western countries, namely United States had issue of getting rubber material from Asian countries where many of them had fallen into Japanese hand. How can they make fighter jets without tires? No tires, mean no fighter jet! Desperately, they invented the first synthetic rubber in the world called Styrene Butadiene Rubber ie SBR rubber. In the modern days, we still rely on synthetic rubber even the war has over for decades. Why? Because each synthetic rubbers have its own application/ usage. We will discuss this in length later.


Latex dripping slowly from a natural rubber tree ie Hevea brasiliensis

The most widely used rubber in the world is still natural rubber. Natural rubber exhibits highly elastic behaviour that as close as spring effect. For example, natural rubber ball can bounce back by more than 80% from its dropping point. There is no other material that can behave in such a way except spring. However, rubber is not ideal elastic material. There is a viscous component in rubber material that will cause the material to 'flow'. If we stretched a rubber material for a period of time and relax it later, it will return back to 'almost' it's original shape. The key word here is almost. Therefore we regards rubber material as viscoelastic material. This simply means rubber consists of 2 behaviours ie viscous(minor) and elastic (major) behaviour.

Next: We will talk about rubber properties.