Modelling Wear of Intrinsically Self-Healing Elastomers for Reduced Particle Emission and Improved Lifetime Performance in Future e-Mobility Concepts – ModEl-FuturE

The future of technical materials and component designs is strongly affected by the European Green Deal with its ambitions regarding sustainability and durability. The aims of these activities can be achieved only, if material concepts, experimental techniques and numerical modelling are used complementary. Thus, this project will provide numerical approaches to enhance the predictive analysis of materials and products by an experimental-virtual laboratory.
One major aspect of recent and future developments is based on electro-mobility – e-mobility. In the field of transportation, e-mobility will lead to a massive change of the requirements on the tires, namely passenger car, SUV and light truck tires, but also scooter and motorbike tires. Due to the higher weight of e-mobility vehicles, especially because of heavy batteries and an increasing amount of electric and electronic side-devices (sensors, actors), the abrasion of tire tread materials, i.e. filler-reinforced elastomers, will dramatically increase leading to higher particle emissions & pollution, especially in the urban space, i.e. cities. In addition, the durability of traditional tire tread elastomers will be enormously reduced due to the high torsional moment associated with electrical driving concept that immediately acts when starting the electrical engine of e-mobility vehicles. This effect is due to the torque characteristics of electrical engines that differ significantly from those of internal combustion engines, e.g. by showing a constant torque level from low to medium speed and the much higher efficiency. As a result, novel modelling tools, advanced experimental techniques and disruptive material concepts have to be developed to satisfy future trends and requirements on tire materials in terms of high durability, less abrasion and micro-pollution, reduced ecological footprint, increased sustainability and material efficiency. The goal of this project is to create and provide an experimental-virtual laboratory using combined experimental and modelling approaches to predict the lifetime performance of elastomers for future applications not limited to tires but addressing this product explicitly. Special emphasis will be given to modelling fracture-mechanical phenomena and wear. As a prerequisite, advanced experimental techniques characterizing quantitatively the fracture-mechanical properties of elastomers have to be developed, and are available at the end of the project. The scientific challenge lies in the evaluation of the material-intrinsic strength properties, which determine the extension limits of the dynamically loaded elastomer network and the whole rubber parts. Further, disruptive material concepts will be investigated to study their potential of improved resistance against abrasion and wear. Of high interest in this context are elastomers that show self-healing properties. By self-healing processes, crosslinks of elastomers can recover or re-build even under dynamical loading regimes as occurring at real application conditions, e.g. a rolling tire on the road. Material-inherent self-healing effects increase the material-intrinsic strength against both crack initiation and propagation and thus improve the abrasion resistance and as a consequence wear and micro-pollution are reduced. As a result, (nano)particle emission due to abrasion can be significantly reduced resulting in an enhanced lifetime of technical products, e.g. tires. To improve the future development of tailor-made material concepts with adjusted mechanical properties, the digital modelling using an experimental database will be enhanced by approaches of artificial intelligence to provide an efficient and realistic experimental-virtual laboratory. Due to the high interdisciplinarity of this project, a systematic way of working addressing the intended aims is required. TRL have to be distinguished regarding the single project tasks and partners, but generally they are below TRL 5.