Bridgestone has also developed the concept of a tire without air by substituting the radius of the inner surface of the stretched tire to support the weight of the vehicle.
These tires require no maintenance and riders can finally say "goodbye to the leaking tire '.
Dandelion Taraxacum officinale by the Latin name is often used for teas and salads are very good for health. But there is another type known as the Russian dandelion Taraxacum kok-saghyz or which can be utilized for vehicle tires.
Bridegstone America were investigating the Russian dandelion as a raw material for making high-quality vehicle tires. After initial experiments, they will continue testing in the lab of materials engineering at Akron and Tokyo in the coming months.
After following the trial will be continued in an even larger scale in 2014. The experiment is part of the Russian dandelion project to find alternatives for natural rubber at Ohio State University.
Bridgestone role in this project is to test the performance of the material. Russian dandelion has a quality that is very similar to natural rubber extracted from havea (rubber tree), which is currently the main source of natural rubber used in tires.
Taraxacum kok-saghyz itself has been known as a source of rubber since the 1930s, when the Soviet Union found in Kazakhstan in 1932. At that time, was trying to find sources of local rubber from Hevea brasiliensis supplies threatened in Southeast Asia.
But when the supply returns to normal and affordable after World War II ended, the Russian dandelion program was discontinued.
One of the two main reasons he glanced back to this plant as a source of rubber because the industry requires new materials to meet increasing demand. And this should not be difficult because there are about 1,200 species of plants that can produce natural rubber, although not entirely meet the requirements of the industry.
Secondly, the industry wants to make new materials research as much as possible in the ongoing effort to increase environmental awareness in the auto industry with the supply of raw materials that can be updated.
Research aligned with dandelion, Bridgestone is also researching other sources of natural rubber called guayule are numerous in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico.
