Trinseo expands SBR product line for tires

HANOVER, Germany—Trinseo S.A. has added to its solution SBR family of products as the global materials firm looks to address what it sees as several key trends in the overall mobility market, as 80 percent of its synthetic rubber production ends up in the performance tire market.

The Berwyn, Pa.-based firm unveiled its Sprintan-brand 918S S-SBR at the recent Tire Technology Expo in Hanover. The firm said the new material achieves a balance between rolling resistance, high grip and a good mechanical property profile.

Trinseo said it developed Sprintan 918S to solve such challenges as physical stability, safety and high fuel efficiency while at the same time delivering a material with easy processability for the tread of ultra-high performance tires.

"That is something we have been focused on, making sure whatever we produce does not stay in the lab level but makes its way on the road," Samer Al Jabi, Trinseo's global business director for synthetic rubber, said in an interview shortly after the Tire Technology Expo. "That's very important for tire makers."

Al Jabi said the key drivers Trinseo has been monitoring in the tire market include sustainable mobility, legislation, performance and the mobility revolution.

The Trinseo official said sustainability is tied to energy efficiency, with tires contributing more than 30 percent of the carbon dioxide of a vehicle. It's much like what happened previously in the refrigerator industry, where consumers began paying attention to labels outlining how much energy the appliance was using. So while in the past tire buyers were more concerned with the quality of the tire, now they increasingly are looking at other factors such as fuel efficiency, safety, noise and other factors.

Legislation is tied closely to this driver, according to Al Jabi, with Europe, the U.S. and other regions pressing mandates to reduce CO² emissions in cars.

Performance needs are driven by the continued rise in the demand for sport-utility vehicles and light trucks, vehicles he said are larger and by default consume more fuel.

And all of these areas must be addressed at the same time auto makers are looking at the next generation of mobility, with electric and autonomous vehicles high on the priority list. "This is bringing a new dimension to the market," Al Jabi said. "What type of tires will you have on these cars? The parameters of rolling resistance, noise and speed all are changing. The tires have to be adjusted to adapt to these new requirements."

Evolving with the market

What that means to Trinseo's SR business is that tire maker customers are looking to it more than ever for solutions. He said they want new materials to help position them either in the original equipment or replacement markets.

"The pressure has been tremendous," Al Jabi said. "In the last decade we have helped the auto market reduce rolling resistance in cars through our solution SBR materials by more than 25 percent. Tire makers are coming to ask us to repeat this in a span of three to four years to be able to meet the new requirements."

The problem is that in achieving more gains in rolling resistance, tire makers can't sacrifice safety or the properties of the "magic triangle" of tire performance, covering wet grip, rolling resistance and durability. In addition, Al Jabi said new materials needed to be processed easily by tire producers, in a way expanding the triangle.

"Everybody in the industry underestimated that complexity, meaning they wanted all the new fancy polymers out there, along with fillers such as silica," he said. "But then they could not make it work on a tire or on a high production scale. Tire producers need to run their plants heavy and hard to make economic sense."

That's where Trinseo looked to strike the right balance when developing the Sprintan 918S S-SBR. The first step to making it work was partnering with its customers, an area Al Jabi said Trinseo has a bit of an advantage with thanks to its status as an independent synthetic rubber producer.

"We need to work closely with them to understand their needs," he said. "They all have different compounding routines and different capabilities in processability."

Much of Trinseo's development starts with a hypothesis, and then looks at the technologies Trinseo possesses to work toward solving the problem. "The fact that our technology allows us to create that type of different dimensions within the polymers, that is the kind of competency we have," the Trinseo executive said.

Sprintan 918S was a fairly fast development, with work starting in 2018 and samples delivered to customers within the year. Al Jabi said the new S-SBR has been tested by several tire makers, giving Trinseo the validation it needed to put it on the market.

"We felt confident it's the right time to bring this out," he said. "This is not a typical exercise from a lab work into a launch. It had trials and was tested by customers.

"We have long-term relationships established. There's a lot of trust and a lot of collaboration, and as such that opens up doors for you to go work on projects. The amount of testing we have companies do is tremendous."

Future SR direction

The synthetic rubber business is one of five major business units within Trinseo, making up $573 million of overall company sales of $4.6 billion in 2018, according to company data. For the first quarter of 2019, SR sales fell 16 percent because of lower revenues from S-SBR and emulsion SBR, along with some negative impact from foreign currency exchange. Its EBITDA of $9 million on the quarter was $17 million less than the first three months of 2018, the company reported.

Trinseo's SR business also supplies neodymium butadiene rubber and nickel butadiene rubber, but Al Jabi said S-SBR remains the unit's primary focus. "It is the biggest and most differentiated product that we have," he said, "where we have the latest-generation technology that goes into performance tires.

The firm also has invested substantially in S-SBR the past couple of years. In 2018 it brought on stream a state-of-the art pilot plant for S-SBR at its production site in Schkopau, Germany. In addition, Trinseo expanded production of S-SBR capacity in Schkopau by 50,000 metric tons a year, boosting its global production capability for the SR by 33 percent.

The pilot plant allows Trinseo to produce batches of a few hundred kilograms up through multi-ton orders, and also gives the company much needed flexibility to scale up to production quantities, Al Jabi said. In the past, Trinseo had a mini plant, something that worked well enough for lab testing but not as well when looking to bring output up to larger batches for commercial delivery.

"This pilot plant will give us enough material for tire testing and the same exacts specs of a production plant," he said.

And while the overall SR market is huge, Trinseo concentrates on a small sliver of the sector where the company's strengths can be rewarded. "Why we like this market is because of all the trends and drivers," Al Jabi said. "It's depending on technology and innovation. It's a high qualification base, and the barriers for entry are not all that easy.

"It's a high capital business and we have been investing heavily in new S-SBR capacity and pilot plants, but also in people and resources. You need R&D and you need technology centers to execute all these innovations. It's one of our focus areas for the company and it's a sustainable product. That's one of the attractive points in this market."