Katerina Filzer

PhD candidate

Katerina Filzer started studying chemistry in 2016 at Paderborn University in Germany. There, she got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees before starting her PhD project in February 2022 at the University of Twente, Netherlands, in the sustainable polymer chemistry and elastomer technology and engineering groups. Her project focuses on improving the devulcanization of rubber as well as the biodegradation of wear particles.

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Presentation

Innovative method to incorporate a devulcanization aid into rubber

Over the past decade, rubber recycling has become a topic of great interest. In the European Union alone over 300 million end-of-life tires are discarded yearly, but this material can be recycled and reused. Various devulcanization technologies were developed to produce a high-quality recycled rubber from end-of-life tires; however, one of the main challenges remains to distribute the devulcanization agent equally within the rubber matrix. Within this study, an innovative technology was developed based on the incorporation of the devulcanization agent at an earlier stage during the production of the rubber product and activation in the thermomechanochemical devulcanization process.