Cabot carbon elastomers gain traction in off-road tire market

Boston, Massachusetts – Cabot Corp. has seen ‘clear adoption’ of its engineered elastomer composites (E2C) in the off-road tire segment, four years after launching the product series into the market.

As previously reported by ERJ, the composites use a "proprietary technology" for mixing reinforcing agents into elastomers.

They are claimed to 'expand the performance triangle, shorten development cycles, and reduce operational barriers to new product commercialisation.

Commenting on the uptake of the product by customers, Cabot’s CEO and president Sean Keohane said the market development for the product was 'a matter of customer adoption'.

“It is a high performance [product], but with a novel technology that does require some change in the customer's production process,” he said in a 6 Feb first-quarter earnings call.

The process, he explained, involves making some changes to the front end – mixing part – of the tire manufacturing plant.

According to the Cabot leader, the company has seen “very clear adoption in the market segment for off-the-road tires”.

“These are large earth-moving tires, and that's where particularly the wear and cut and chip performance of this enhanced compound really plays very strongly,” Keohane added.

The segment, he went on to add, is the first place where customers are commercialising the use of the composites.

Keohane believes that the next segment to take up the technology would be the truck and bus tires market.

"They're trying to improve the wear characteristics, and also balance the fuel economy or the rolling resistance [of truck & bus tires],” he added.

According to the Cabot boss, the company already has “a number of customers that are in extended road tests right now in that application.”