2023

ArticlesFeaturedSilicone & MedicalTech Service

Metallurgical grade silicon metal and silicone rubber: A matter of national security

Metallurgical grade silicon metal (SiME) is essential to the production of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) silicone rubber, a material that is indispensable to modern life. As this article will show, metallurgical grade SiME, and not simply silicon, belongs on the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Critical Materials List because of its importance to national security. Currently, the DOE’s Critical Materials List includes “silicon,” a term that is overly broad because it also includes elemental silicon and polysilicon.

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ArticlesFeaturedTire Technology & Manufacturing

High molecular weight functionalized batch SSBR for EV tires

In December 2015, the United Nations Climate Change Conference was held in Paris. The conference negotiated the Paris Agreement, which is a global agreement on the reduction of climate change. At the follow-up climate change conference in Marrakech (COP22) in November 2016, the member states of the Kyoto Protocol agreed to set the goal of limiting global warming to a still acceptable level of less than 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. This target requires that the zero emission of CO2 is achieved soon.

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