Dynamic mechanical analyzers (DMAs) have been used in the tire and rubber industries for many years. Now, subambient DMA measurements are used extensively as an effective way of estimating tire performance on the highway.
The federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is using DMA for this purpose as well. However, the DMA can also be a very valuable tool in quality assurance work to investigate and determine “assignable causes of variation” for problems in tire manufacture.
This paper discusses how the DMA can be used for these investigations of variables suspected of contributing to such tire performance variations.
