On January 25, Shandong Province’s top ten scientific and technological innovation achievements in 2025 were officially released. Among them, the research and development breakthrough of high-end tire barrier material DVA (high gas barrier dynamic vulcanization alloy material for tires) has attracted widespread attention in the global tire industry.
This achievement not only fills my country’s technological gap in the field of high-end tire core materials, but also marks that my country has achieved a leap from following to leading the world in the tire core material track.
As a core component for safe driving, tires are divided into three layers of core structure: the outermost tread determines grip, rolling resistance and other properties, the middle belt layer and carcass bear the weight of the vehicle body, and the innermost air barrier layer is responsible for locking the tire pressure.
For more than 80 years, the air barrier layer of tires around the world has been using butyl rubber, which was mass-produced in 1943. Although this material meets the air tightness standard, it is too heavy. The air barrier layer of a single household car tire weighs 1.4 kilograms, which is no longer in line with the current development needs of lightweight automobiles.
Previously, only overseas giants in the world had mastered the new generation of DVA barrier material technology. Its gas barrier effect is 7-10 times that of traditional butyl rubber and can reduce the weight of a single tire by nearly 1 kilogram. However, it has not been able to achieve large-scale commercial application because it cannot adapt to the existing tire production process.
my country’s DVA R&D team started technical research in 2008. It initially targeted reverse research and development based on overseas published performance indicators. It took 12 years to finally make the performance of laboratory samples reach the level of similar overseas products.
However, the R&D team soon discovered that the replica’s technical solution could not be adapted to the existing production lines of domestic tire companies. To apply this technology, tire companies would need to invest heavily in transforming the production lines, and the feasibility of implementation was extremely low.
To this end, the R&D team adjusted its technical route, jumped out of the idea of “replicating the standard answer”, created the first “bi-continuous heterogeneous cross-linked structure” material system, and came up with a disruptive plan to “adapt the material to the production line”: by accurately controlling the material reaction progress, the DVA material in a semi-reactive state and retaining viscosity can directly fit the inner wall of the tire like traditional butyl rubber, and then complete the final reaction in the tire production process.
In order to realize this solution, the R&D team broke through the world-class problem of precise control of reaction time, abandoned the traditional reactor production logic, and independently developed an 8th generation pipeline reaction device, gradually extending the viscosity window period of DVA materials from the first few dozen seconds to more than 15 days, fully meeting the needs of cross-regional transportation and global supply, and completely opening up the last mile of DVA materials from the laboratory to mass production.
Currently, test tires equipped with domestic DVA materials have been tested in many domestic cities, and all performance indicators have met expectations.
As the world’s largest producer and consumer of new energy vehicles and the world’s largest tire producer, my country’s unique and complete industrial ecology provides unique soil for the implementation and iteration of DVA technology.
At present, many new energy vehicle companies have taken the initiative to connect with R&D teams and plan to apply DVA materials to tires for high-end models to jointly tackle the “impossible triangle” of tire performance of rolling resistance, wear resistance and road holding performance, and create “super tires” with better performance.
The implementation of this technology will not only greatly enhance the global competitiveness of my country’s tire industry, but also provide a new Chinese path for the technological upgrading of the global tire industry. It once again proves to the world that Chinese manufacturing can not only keep up with the pace of global cutting-edge technology, but also overcome long-standing common problems in the global industry and light up a new beacon in the deep water area of industrial innovation.
