A new rotary tribometer to study the wear of reinforced rubber materials

A rotary tribometer has been developed in order to reproduce abrasion wear at the interface between the reinforced rubber material of a tire tread and the road surface, under controlled environmental parameters. The characteristics of the device are described in this paper. It consists in a spherical indenter sliding on the rubber material under study. The control parameters are the normal load, the ratio between the indenter radius and the sample thickness, the sliding velocity, the number of passages, the time interval between two passages, and the temperature. The friction coefficient and weight loss are measured all along the wear test. Wear patterns are observed in situ with an optical pen. We show preliminary results on reinforced natural rubber materials which illustrate the potentialities of the setup. Different wear patterns could be created and observed, according to the conditions.