Natural Rubber Research Paper

Natural rubber (NR) is well known around the world and especially in our country Malaysia due to its wide applications in rubber industry. Natural rubber latex (NRL) can be obtained from hevea brasiliensis tree. There are so many important products that are manufactured from natural rubbers for our daily usage. For example, tyres, gloves and balloons are made up of natural rubber latex. Natural rubber is well known with its valuable and beneficial properties including good flexibility/elasticity and mechanical strength, resistant towards tear and low heat build-up. (Derouet et al., 2009; Chern et al., 2006).
Despite all of the excellent properties of natural rubber, there are few weakness that attract researchers’ attention. NR is easily exposed

As we know all starch is made up of amylose and amylopectin molecules which rice starch also has the characteristic. According to (Antoine et al., 2006), it is proven that the amount of amylose in the specific starch can give effect to the properties especially mechanical properties of the NR. Hence, the amount of amylose in rice starch adequate to show some improvement in NR’s mechanical properties. This study will focus on the effect on the properties of NR when rice starch undergo chemically modification. We will study the difference in mechanical properties when we use unmodified rice starch and chemically modified rice starch as reinforcing filler in NR.
2.3 CHEMICAL MODIFICATION ON STARCH VIA GRAFTING POLYMERISATION
As one of the objectives of this study, we need to modify the starches chemically to observe on the improvement on the natural rubber properties. Starch needed to be modified as mentioned above as their interaction with the matrix needed to be increased to get a better blending of NR/starch. There are so many study on modification of starch have been reported. According to (Katarzyna et al., 2007), the longer the hydrocarbon of alkyl chain acted on starches, the better the improvement on the properties of starches hence the hydrophobicity also

The example of physical modifications that have been reported so far were addition of external plasticizer and hydrophobic coating on the starches. (Poutanen et al., 1996) According to (Krzysztof et al., 2003), chemical modifications showed better improvement of properties on starches compared to physical modifications.
Example of chemical modification that has been done was plasticization. Plasticization has been done on the starch to alter the surface interaction between them. (Tomita et al., 2005) Other chemical modification that has been done was acid hydrolysis which the purpose wass to produce nanocrystals and decrease the surface of starch. (Angellier et al., 2005).
Gelatinisation is one of the most used modification technique that is done on starch. Water as plasticiser and salt play role in this gelatinisation process as they prevent the blending difficulty. However, salt reduce the efficiency of gelatinisation process and the cost of salt also is high. (Rutenburg et al., 1984) Hence, other chemical modification without high cost will be always