TARRC Seminar

The Tun Abdul Razak Research Centre (TARRC) has been deeply involved for the past two years in an EU-funded CRAFT project, the aim of which is to achieve better assessment of new tyre casing integrity in order to increase the number of tyres retreaded in Europe. TARRC hosted a seminar to discuss the impact of existing and proposed regulations on retreaders and some findings from the CRAFT project. The reason for the CRAFT project was based on a concern by retreaders that the quality of some new tyre casings was decreasing, with the danger that the industry could be deprived of its basic raw material.

Principal research objectives included the development of new tests in order to predict the retreadability of new tyres, the establishment of a best practice drum test and a league table of tyre brands, rated according to their retreadability. The project will be finished this year. In investigating retreadability, TARRC tested a number of tyres in accordance with Regulation 54, the standard against which new tyres are tested.

Under this standard, tyres are drum tested for 47 hours. The results were extremely surprising and indicate that either Regulation 54 is deeply flawed, or that the tyre industry has a problem. Testing 295/80 R22.

5 M-rated tyres, the results showed a failure rate among new tyres of 20.8%. The new tyre manufacturers usually carry out their own tests and their failure rates are nothing like this figure, which begs the question why is there such a disparity between manufacturers’ results and the findings from TARRC? Under the new retreading Regulation 109, tyres are chosen and tested at random by an outside agency.

Is there any independent validation of the in-house testing of new tyres? A proposal was made that new tyre manufacturers and retreaders cooperate in a programme of cross-testing new tyres in order to try and solve this apparent anomaly. Whether or not this will happen remains to be seen..