Nick Molden

Molden founded Emissions Analytics in 2011 to understand real-world emissions and fuel economy and emissions from vehicles, which evolved into understanding the holistic environmental impact of vehicles on air, soil and water, from tire wear rates to volatile organic compound emissions. Molden is chairman of the European standardization CEN Workshop 90 on collecting real driving tailpipe emissions data, which led to the publication of the AIR Index. He is also chairman of CEN Workshop 103 on standardizing the measurement of vehicle interior air quality, and is an honorary senior research fellow at Imperial College London.

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Presentation

Chemical fingerprint for environmental detection of tire rubber emissions

Over 2.3 billion tires are produced globally per year, with an ever-increasing complexity of chemical additives to optimize safety and performance. Greater understanding of the chemicals and polymer degradation products allows the environmental impact of tires to be better understood. This presentation shows an untargeted pyrolysis GC-MS method to analyze tire rubber for environmentally important chemicals to develop a comprehensive tire chemical source profile – 340 tires from light, medium and heavy-duty tires from Europe. The tire antioxidant 6PPD is the only chemical detected in every tire, and the presentation will show how a single chemical tracer for tire wear is insufficient.