A Study of the Rubber-Metal Bond
Abstract Although the practice of bonding rubber to metal has been in use for many years, no theories appear to have been advanced which explain adequately the mechanism of bonding. It has been stated that the brass bond between rubber and metal functions through chemical linkages, but this can only be regarded as tentative and has yet to be proved. No attempt has been made to find out how ebonite functions as a bonding medium or the more recently discovered derivatives of rubber, such as sulfonated rubber, chlorinated rubber, and rubber hydrohalides. Until it is properly elucidated just how bonding agents do act, further logical development of improved bonding media cannot be pursued. It is intended in this paper to show how the rubber-metal bond behaves at subnormal temperatures and how a low temperature technique may be used for studying the mechanism of bonding. The effect of low temperatures on the tensile strength and associated properties of vulcanized rubber, such as hardness, permanent set, flexibility, resilience and flexing, has been dealt with fairly comprehensively in the literature. Progressive reduction in temperature leads to only a moderate increase, for example, in tensile strength, until the point is reached at which the rubber stiffens and freezes, when a marked increase occurs. Examination of a brass-bonded unit at low temperatures revealed that the graph obtained for bond strength was very similar in slope and character to that for tensile strength. The similarity is illustrated by the data in Table 1 and in Figure 1.