Rubber is not just rubber. It is an intricate structure consisting of polymers mixed with other particles. Although it was almost 200 years since Charles Goodyear invented the vulcanization process and thus laid the foundation for the rubber tires we know today, so far, it has been a sort of black box what happens when mixing and heating the various ingredients. But thanks to computer models and the supercomputer Abacus 2.0, one now begins to understand how the individual molecules in rubber materials behave. And that is something that interests the German tire company Continental. They have entered into a research collaboration with Carsten Svaneborg, associate professor at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark, who is an expert in computer simulations of polymer materials. In this episode, you can hear Carsten Svaneborg tell you about cooperation with Continental and about the possibilities of understanding the characteristics of the rubber using computer simulations on a supercomputer.
Hear the podcast: https://vidensportal.deic.dk/podcasts
Read more about Carsten Svaneborg’s research at http://www.zqex.dk
