Sulfur vulcanization a substantial fraction of natural and synthetic rubber. Reclaimed rubber has altered properties and is unsuitable for use in many products, including tires. Tires and other vulcanized products are potentially amenable to devulcanization, but this technology has not produced material that can supplant unvulcanized materials. The main problem is that the carbon-sulfur linkages are not readily broken, without the input of costly reagents and heat. Thus, more than half of scrap rubber is simply burned for fuel. Although polymeric sulfur is unstable and decomposes back to its monomer, it is possible to create stable polymers consisting mostly of sulfur via
Rubber toughening materials where crazing and yielding are comparable, a bimodal distribution of particle size may be useful for toughening. At fixed rubber concentrations, one can find that an optimal particle size is a function of the entanglement density of the polymer matrix. The neat polymer entanglement densities of PS, SAN, and PMMA are 0.056, 0.093, and 0.127 respectively. As entanglement density increases, the optimum particle size decreases linearly, ranging between 0.1 and 3 micrometers. The effect of particle size on toughening is dependent on the type of test performed. This can be explained because for different test conditions, the failure mechanism