In our daily life, we will directly or indirectly contact with a lot of silicone products, which bring great convenience to our life.






However, many people will confuse silica gel with rubber. In fact, silica gel is only one of the materials in rubber. In addition to silica gel, rubber also includes natural rubber, fluororubber, nitrile rubber, PVC, EPDM, etc. What is the difference between silicone rubber and rubber? How can we distinguish them?






Rubber has high strength, insulation, sound insulation, damping, wear resistance, toughness and resilience, excellent scalability and energy storage capacity; it is usually used in industrial fields as sealing, insulation, wear resistance and anti-skid accessories, such as automobile tires, anti-skid seals, wires and cables, rubber plugs, metal wrapping, etc.; while silica gel is an environmentally friendly and non-toxic material, which is insoluble in water Water and solvent, with excellent softness and dielectric properties, high and low temperature resistance and chemical corrosion resistance, easy to clean, long life; often used as daily necessities, maternal and infant kitchenware, medical equipment accessories, adult supplies, protective cover, button cap and other products.








weighing






Even for two silicone rubber products with the same size and appearance color, we can compare and analyze silica gel and rubber by weighing, because the density of silica gel material is much lower than that of rubber material.






Low temperature resistance






By placing silicone products and rubber products in a low temperature environment for three to five minutes, you can feel the soft hardness between them in a specific low temperature environment. The softer one is silicone material, while the harder one is rubber material. For example, silicone and fluororubber products with the same high temperature and oil resistance feel much harder than silicone in an environment of - 40 ℃.






High temperature resistance






By putting silica gel and rubber into high-temperature oven for curing for more than three hours at the same time, the results show that silica gel can not only completely remove the odor after the second high-temperature baking, but also discharge the impurities in the colloid to meet the standard of food grade silica gel; at this time, the rubber not only has poor resilience, but also has obvious pungent odor and even fracture phenomenon.






Combustion method






Through high-temperature combustion of silicone and rubber products, we can get the material of products through analysis. For example, silicone combustion is white smoke, white powder will be produced after burning, while most rubber is black smoke. The flame of EPDM and natural rubber is small when burning, and the fire source of NBR and PVC will splash when burning, while fluororubber, chloroprene rubber and chlorosulfonated polyethylene will not Rubber will self extinguish when burning.