"Self-healing" rubber

DavidBelcher

Anyone else seen this on the BBC website or in the papers;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7254939.stm

Seems to me that some form of puncture repair would be an obvious application of the idea!

David

Jeff Jones

Or even a set of more puncture resistant tyres, healing all those cuts caused by glass etc.

huggy

Looks great, though it's self healing, it doesn't look that tough

popette

the guy was on five live last night and I seem to remember him saying that it needed to be heated to 90 degrees C to get the "healing" bit to work (female presenter was asking if it would be any good as a material for making self healing tights and he said no because you wouldn't want your legs at 90 C )

Harry B

Jeff Jones wrote:

Or even a set of more puncture resistant tyres, healing all those cuts caused by glass etc.

Years ago I remember watching Tomorrow's World and seeing some tyres that were impossible to puncture. They weren't solid but instead almost like a very dense foam that was quite hard.

What ever happened to that? Bought out by a consortium on tyre manufacturers no doubt :?

Richrd2205

Harry
Is this what you mean? http://www.greentyre.com/
They were rated very, very badly & folk said they were awful to ride & quite slow IIRC, which is why I guess that they're not universal...
The material in the OP looks quite interesting as a potential for a inner tube, but I'm unconvinced that it'll be any great improvement on patches & will prob be more expensive than several inner tubes once the R & D costs are reclaimed..

synchronicity

cool! thanks for sharing this link! 8)

DavidBelcher

Richrd2205 wrote:

Harry
Is this what you mean? http://www.greentyre.com/
They were rated very, very badly & folk said they were awful to ride & quite slow IIRC, which is why I guess that they're not universal...
The material in the OP looks quite interesting as a potential for a inner tube, but I'm unconvinced that it'll be any great improvement on patches & will prob be more expensive than several inner tubes once the R & D costs are reclaimed..

Re. the self-healing rubber I posted about - I guess a big problem would be stopping the surfaces of the inner tube sticking to each other before inflation, and also to the inside of the tyre and to rim tapes!
As for Greentyres - I used to have a set of 700c road ones, but they made for a very slow, uncomfortable ride.

David