Shorter cycle times, increasing cost pressure, accompanied by new environmental and safety provisions – the framing conditions of the industry are becoming more complex year after year. Our new solid tires emerged as a response to these.
Our engineers focused on two crucial factors during their development: A once more extended service life with simultaneously lower rolling resistance. They managed to combine these two requirements without compromise in one tire technology. This was made possible by the newly developed Plus Compound, which is based on a selection of high-quality raw materials and a complex finishing process.
- More mileage thanks to the new Plus Compound
- Silica acts as a crack stopper and makes the compund even more resistant
- The lower heat development in the tire increases the energy efficiency
The new Continental solid tires enable greater mileage*, are outstandingly robust and at the same time extremely energy efficient.
Plus Compound
The utilized rubber compound is the critical quality factor especially for solid tires. The goal of our new development was to generate a polymer-matrix with as many shortchained sulfur connections as possible. The sulfur serves as adhesive between polymer chains and makes the rubber elastic on one side and robust on the other. In this matrix, additionally stabilizing firm components are embedded to reduce wear as well as silica to stop cracks. The result is an even more durable and cut-resistant rubber compound. At the same time, the stability of this rubber mixture ensures that the tires crack less, minimizing the interior temperature build-up and the connected rolling resistance.
The main component of our rubber compound continues to be natural rubber. For it alone exhibits a wealth of crucial properties that no synthetic product can offer. As is the case with all natural products, the quality of natural rubber is subject to fluctuations, which are influenced by factors such as climate conditions, cultivation and harvest, as well as the processing techniques. Thanks to our decades of experience, our close contact to suppliers of raw materials and our large procurement volume, we are in a position to access the best materials the world market has to offer.
Vulcanization, the process, by which means the mixture of raw materials transforms into finished tires, is highly complex. Even in a tire prior to vulcanization that weighs several hundred kilos, minor temperature fluctuations during the processing can have a negative impact on the final product’s quality.
That is why we tailored our vulcanization process specifically to the requirements of solid tires. In addition to the targeted mixing of raw materials and precise temperature management throughout the entire production, this also includes the article-specific heating times, which positively affect the rolling resistance of the finished tire.
This system alone allows a product to be manufactured that meets our quality requirements.