ABSTRACT
The building block or monomer, polymerized, becomes the elastomer. The elastomer will become a crosslinked rubber by incorporating the polymer chains into a network structure. In this socalled curing or vulcanizing process the double bonds of the polymer chain serve as curing sites. In diene-based elastomers each repeat unit has a potential curing site; in diene-containing copolymer elastomers such as styrene-butadiene, the diene sequences will provide the potential crosslinking sites. The crosslink density will be determined by the fraction of the sites that actually participated in the crosslinking process. In the literature the terms "elastomer" and "rubber" are often used interchangeably.
