New Lanxess vulcanisation accelerator

A new product that specialty chemicals company Lanxess will soon trial with customers promises sufficient time for full cross-linking, even at high temperatures. The VP Vulkacit TZ vulcanisation accelerator is a sulfenamide based on aromatic amines and is suitable for all types of rubber. Lanxess foresees its use in the production of tyres and technical rubber goods.

“We are now inviting our industrial customers to try our new high-performance VP Vulkacit TZ for themselves. We are already producing pilot-scale samples,” says Dr Jens-Hendrik Fischer, who is responsible for the global antioxidants and accelerators business within Lanxess’s Advanced Industrial Intermediates (AII) business unit.

Lanxess says the trial product has an “impressively long” scorch time. “There is no premature onset of the vulcanisation process for the rubber, which has to pass through pipelines in the mixing process, and consequently it does not stick to sections of the production plant,” explains Melanie Wiedemeier-Jarad, technical service manager for the company’s AII Antioxidants & Accelerators (AXX) unit. “This particular property of our VP Vulkacit trial product thus ensures a smooth production process and homogeneous cross-linking, which means that the structure can cure evenly.”

Cure times for all mixtures produced using a sulfenamide vulcanisation accelerator tend to be short in relation to scorch times. This group of accelerators is thus not only suitable for press heating, but also for injection and transfer moulding processes, which are used primarily for complex geometries.