This study presents the development of natural rubber-Ca/P blends, as promising candidates for biomedical purposes. The specific objective was the incorporation of Ca/P into a natural rubber polymeric matrix. Ca/P crystalline phases were synthesized by the sol-gel method and the polymeric matrices were produced using natural rubber extracted from latex of the Hevea brasiliensis. The shape and s...

The increasing expansion of rubber plantations throughout East and Southeast Asia urgently requires improved methods for effective mapping and monitoring. The phenological information from rubber plantations was found effective in rubber mapping. Previous studies have mostly applied rule-pixel-based phenology approaches for rubber plantations mapping, which might result in broken patches in fra...

In tire industry, it is very crucial to evaluate physical and mechanical properties of the rubber which is used for production of the tire, to ensure the quality of the final product. Resilience is an important property of a rubber, which cannot be evaluated through direct measurement in production cycle in this industry. Therefore, non-destructive ultrasonic testing, which has been used in man...

The enormous increase in the commercial demand for the rubber and the probability of the continuance of this increase in view of the great variety of purposes to which the material can be applied, demands a thorough understanding of its structure, composition and physical/mechanical properties. Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene rubber (HNBR) and Chlorosulphonated monomer (CSM) were investigated in...

Rubber-based (Hevea brasiliensis) agroforestry systems are regarded as the best way to improve the sustainability of rubber monocultures, but few reports have examined water use in such systems. Accordingly, we tested whether interplanting facilitates water utilization of rubber trees using stable isotope (δD, δ(18)O, and δ(13)C) methods and by measuring soil water content (SWC), shoot potentia...

This paper presents three selection techniques (called Rubber-lingsweep, Line-string and Coupling-with-pressure) to enhance multi-target acquisition in GUIs and to overcome the drawback of the standard rubber-band box technique, i.e., the limitation of not being able to select an irregular layout of targets. Rubber-line-sweep utilizes a rubber-band line to select targets by “sweeping” them. Lin...

Cytotoxicity of 14 glove materials representing 4 natural rubber latex, 6 synthetic rubber and 4 synthetic polymeric materials was evaluated using dimethylthiazol diphenyltetrazolium (MTT), agar overlay and filter diffusion tests. Cell responses after contact with extracts of glove materials and contact with glove materials were assessed. One synthetic rubber glove (nitrile rubber) and 2 synthe...

Commercially useful rubber products viz. gloves, condoms, tyres, and rubber hoses used in high temperature environments, etc., require efficient thermal conductivity, which increases the lifetime of these products. Graphene can fetch this property, if it is effectively incorporated into the rubber matrix. The great challenge in preparing graphene-rubber nanocomposites is formulating a scalable ...

In this work, we report about the mechanical relaxation characteristics of an intrinsically self-healable imidazole modified commercial rubber. This kind of self-healing rubber was prepared by melt mixing of 1-butyl imidazole with bromo-butyl rubber (bromine modified isoprene-isobutylene copolymer, BIIR). By this melt mixing process, the reactive allylic bromine of bromo-butyl rubber was conver...

A common tactile display design uses an array of mechanical pins covered by a rubber layer which acts as a spatial low pass filter. To characterize the perceptual relationship between this rubber layer and shape rendering, we conducted psychophysical experiments to examine the perception of a vertical line stimulus felt using rubber covers of varying thickness and stiffness. We found no signifi...