Rubber compound for low temperature applications

Glove Manufacturer: The service temperatures of our Natural Rubber based products could sometimes be well below 0°C and the products becomes too stiff. Would appreciate if you could explain such phenomenon and give us some guidance on the formulation for such application.

John Woon (Senior Latex Consultant): Natural Rubber generally exhibits higher tendency to crystallise at low temperature when compared to some synthetic rubbers. This is because natural rubber has higher stereoregularity in it's polyisoprene molecules.

Deliberately increasing the levels of sulphur and accelerators, particularly sulphur or increasing the sulphur to accelerators ratio would help to reduce the tendency to crystallise at low temperatures due to the formation of cyclic sulphidic cross-linkings along the polyisoprene main chains.

Addition of some plasticizers will lower the Tg and therefore would also be helpful in reducing the stiffening effect at low temperatures.

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