ABSTRACT
To avoid higher cost for development of new materials and to accelerate development cycles, industrial partners are interested in more reliable prediction of abrasion properties on laboratory scale. In this work a new method to evaluate abrasion properties of elastomeric materials with the focus on tire tread compounds is presented. It is found that the abrasion behavior of elastomers depends strongly on how the wear test is carried out. Abrasion properties depend not only on material composition, but also on conditions under which the material is tested. The comparison with the standard DIN ISO 4649 method reveals a much better differentiation between materials made of various formulations. Moreover, the rating is strongly varying with the applied severity condition during the test. In this frame different abrasion contributions, e.g. abrasive wear and fatigue wear, can be identified and combined with each other to have an improved guess for real tire performance.
