EVALUATING OPTIMUM CONDITIONS FOR FATIGUE LIFE OF NR-BASED RUBBER COMPOUNDS USING THE TAGUCHI METHOD

In the present work, four relevant factors, temperature, time, humidity, and storage condition (Oxygen-flow rate) were selected, and to monitor the extent of degradation, the effect of each factor was studied at three different levels on the ozone resistant and fatigue life time of rubber compounds. The optimal combination of physical parameters based on the Taguchi protocol and maximum fatigue life was obtained. Comparison between the confirmation run and prediction from optimal factor settings illustrate that the Taguchi parameter design is very practicable in optimizing the factors influencing aging of natural rubber based compounds. Taguchi method stresses the importance of studying response variation using the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio, resulting in minimization of quality characteristic variations due to uncontrollable parameters. Therefore, S/N ratio and ANOVA were applied to investigate a set of parameters. The optimum conditions implicated for maximum ozone resistance and fatigue life of aged rubber compounds based on NR were time: one day; temperature: 25 degrees C; storage condition: air, and humidity: 65%.