Natural rubber with high resistance to crack growth | Hacker News Reader

Natural rubber with high resistance to crack growth

nature.com

41 pointscocoggu15 comments

This has huge implications. They were able to cut into a sheet and not only does it not tear but it still supports weight. This basically removes entirely one of the biggest downsides to rubber when selecting substrates for any number of applications.

Thanks for sharing

They only seem to have made a thin film though, can this be produced in bulk?

I wonder what the implications for tires are? Apparently modern tires about 1/3 natural rubber. Presumably if they could be made of close to 100% natural rubber, it would mean less microplastic entering the environment from tire wear. On the other hand, you'd need about 3x as much natural rubber production as we have now, which might not be realistic.

The wear characteristics would come into play too, though. If pure rubber tires wear out faster than mostly-synthetic rubber tires, then you'd need even more natural rubber. On the other hand, if it wears much more slowly than typical modern tires, then maybe current rubber production is sufficient.

(EVs are also prone to somewhat faster tire wear due to additional weight.)

I think it must be much faster tire wear counted in pounds, because the EV tires are also larger.

Really? By how much, and where does the data come from? Is it comparing like for like cars?

No because EVs are typically huge.

The Hyundai Ioniq EV is the same size as the hybrid version and less than a 100 k heavier.

My Tesla S 70D weighs about the same as Mercedes S-class which is a similar size.

The typical EV where I live, Norway, is a Tesla Model 3 or a Volkswagen ID3. The first weighs 1 600 to 1 800 kg, the second 1 700 to 1 900 kg. That makes the Model 3 less than 200 kg heavier than my Rover 75 Connoisseur which was a similar size.

Not everyone has a Mercedes EQ SUV.

No they aren't? There is a collective industry move towards larger rims which actually means less tire, but sacrifices comfort in my opinion. But that industry move isn't for EV or ICE cars just a buying audience that seems to like larger rims.

Generally they use the same tires as normal cars/trucks/vans/suv's.

ie. My E-Transit uses the exact same tire as the regular Transit van because it was already rated for a vehicle that maxes out at nearly 10,000lb.

> it would mean less microplastic

The term plastic is so vague and overloaded now that it won't. Is an elastomer a plastic? Depends on who you ask. Does a plastic have to be derived from petroleum? Depends on who you ask.

tire dust is specifaly toxic to juvinile fish, and as all roads are ditched, any extream early spring rain event will gather and float a concentrated pulse of tire dust into the equatic environment and cause mass mortality in stream and river bound juvinele fish such as salmon my understanding is that it is additives used to make tires tougher that is the main culprit, so the anouncement of an essentialy zero cost way to gain longer lasting tires that produce less, less toxic dust is good news

Plastic, in the industrial/commercial products context, was always a very broad term. In addition to being a broad technical term in industry, it quickly became a moniker for the mid-century industrial chemicals revolution similar to the way "computers" was for the 80s, "the internet" was for the 90s/2000s, "social media" for the 2010s, or "AI" for the 2020s.

Last I looked into it, the tire companies were looking at making rubber from dandelions, somehow. Seemed like it would be great if it actually became viable.

Dandelion rubber was totally a viable thing in Soviet Russia, or, rather, Soviet Kazakhstan. Like many technologies, it's not a question of feasibility but of economic competitiveness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taraxacum_kok-saghyz

> TKS was cultivated on a large scale in the Soviet Union during World War II. The Soviet Union cultivated Taraxacum kok-saghyz, together with Taraxacum hybernum and Scorzonera tau-saghyz, on a large scale between 1931 and 1950—notably during World War II—as an emergency source of rubber when supplies of rubber from Hevea brasiliensis in Southeast Asia were threatened. The United States, the UK, Germany, Sweden and Spain also cultivated the plant for the same reason. During this time period, the highest yields achieved by the U.S. reached 110 kg of rubber per hectare, while the USSR achieved yields of 200 kg of rubber per hectare. The Raisko sub-camp of Auschwitz was a German-operated production factory for the plant. Some of the women deported on the Convoi des 31000 worked on its production there.[8] With the conclusion of World War II and the return of affordable Hevea brasiliensis rubber (which has 8 to 10 times the yield[9]), the majority of T. kok-saghyz programs ceased.

The rubber can also be synthetic, but natural rubber is longer-lasting. The other ⅔ of the tire are mostly carbon black, which is much cheaper than natural rubber and enormously increases the rubber's wear resistance by making it harder. This also improves fuel efficiency by reducing rolling resistance. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_black explains:

> The highest volume use of carbon black is as a reinforcing filler in rubber products, especially tires. While a pure gum vulcanization of styrene-butadiene has a tensile strength of no more than 2 MPa and negligible abrasion resistance, compounding it with 50% carbon black by weight improves its tensile strength and wear resistance as shown in the table below. (...) Practically all rubber products where tensile and abrasion wear properties are important use carbon black, so they are black in color. Where physical properties are important but colors other than black are desired, such as white tennis shoes, precipitated or fumed silica has been substituted for carbon black. Silica-based fillers are also gaining market share in automotive tires because they provide better trade-off for fuel efficiency and wet handling due to a lower rolling loss. Traditionally silica fillers had worse abrasion wear properties, but the technology has gradually improved to a point where they can match carbon black abrasion performance.

So, does this new technique have implications for tires? I don't know. Even if it can be applied industrially at scale, it might make tires less abrasion-resistant rather than more so. Or maybe it will increase the abrasion-resistance and tensile strength of the unfilled rubber, permitting the use of less filler for tires that are more expensive but longer-lasting.

Breakthrough news by Harvard [1]:

[1] Rubber that resists cracking: Improved process makes material 10 times stronger:

https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2025/05/rubber-resists-crackin...

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