Extraction and Analysis of Guayule Natural Rubber
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Date
2022-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Advances in technology make natural rubber created from the Taraxacum-kok-saghyz guayule rubber dandelion an increasingly viable option for an alternative supply in the natural rubber industry. The current standard, Hevea natural rubber, is currently grown nearly exclusively as clones in Southeast Asia, which makes it prone to disease and blight in the long run. The purpose of this experiment was to extract the latex from guayule shrubs to be used in size exclusion chromatography and tensile testing to find the optimal rubber out of ten transgenic variants of the shrub. The goal of the experimentation was to find the natural rubber sample with the most favorable physical properties, with the goal of eventual mass production. There were five different genetic changes and two age groups tested in the study: old and young. After the latex was extracted and coagulated into rubber, a new procedure was developed to compound the rubber samples on a laboratory scale of five grams. Conventional milling methods would be impossible with such small quantities, so a coagulation method was developed to mix the additives into the natural rubber samples. From the results of the experiment, it was found that the different transgenic rubber samples had no statistically significant effect on molecular weight when taken the average of old and young samples, but the age of the sample did have a significant effect. Additionally, statistical analysis of the tensile testing data showed that one rubber combination created the most resilient rubber sample. The AOO Old sample had both the highest tensile stress at break and the lowest Modulus at 100% strain, which makes it the optimal sample out of the six compounds tested. After identifying the optimal rubber sample, future work could be done to replicate the experiment to verify the results, and to streamline the overall process to use less resources and manpower.
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Guayule Natural Rubber Synthesis Analysis