Green Tires | Green Energy News

March 21, 2004 – Vol.8 No.52

GREEN TIRES.

One of the reasons rail vehicles - light rail, heavy rail, subway etc. - are energy-efficient is that the vehicles with solid metal wheels roll easily along solid metal track. There’s little rolling resistance. Rail cars roll like a marble across a floor. There’s almost no contact between the circular wheel and the flat surface of the track.

Compare metal wheels with rubber tires on a car or truck. Even when properly inflated, tires are flat on the bottom. (If they weren’t, gaining traction would be difficult.)

When the doughnut-shaped, air- inflated round tire turns it has to flex and stretch to become flat on the bottom to make adequate contact with the road. This flexing and stretching requires energy. The tire resists rolling. It consumes fuel.

But if a tire flexed and stretched more easily it would consume less fuel.

Dow Corning may have developed a breakthrough solution that may lead to the availability of affordable tires with less rolling resistance than conventional tires - green tires - that would help vehicles get up to 5 percent better fuel economy. Foul weather traction, too, would be improved as much as 15 -20 percent.

The breakthrough is the manufacturing process where silane-treated silica as reinforcing filler in tire compounds is used instead of the usual carbon-black. It’s this manufacturing process that would make the tires affordable.

Dow also analyzed the amount of CO2 released from the manufacturing process with the CO2 avoided from vehicle energy savings. Their findings were that for each ton of CO2 created in the manufacturing process, 250 tons were avoided because of better fuel efficiency

On a fleet-wide basis a savings in a few miles per gallon leads to millions of gallons not imported, not consumed and millions of tons of emissions not blown into the air each year. Visit http://www.dowcorning.com/