Both rubber and urethane are excellent products with a wide variety of uses in today’s industrial world. Some of which overlap and many that don’t. The three main areas of emphasis for these products are abrasion, impact and corrosion. Once you narrow down what type of issue you are trying to combat and what is causing it you can much more easily select a product to best suit your needs.

Let’s start with abrasion. Both rubber and urethane have great abrasion resistant qualities so the cause of the abrasion is key. Rubber is more likely to be the better product if the cause is a sand of slurry type of material causing the issues. If the abrasive material has any type of oils associated with it such as grains or seeds a urethane liner would perform much better. Although there are types of rubber specifically designed for this they are generally a much more expensive option. Urethanes also have a much higher load release capacity if the abrasive is sticky or tends to hang up in your equipment.

When it comes to impact problems most generally rubber is the way to go. The standard durometers or hardness of urethanes are much higher than that of most rubbers. So rubber being softer has much more give to it to cause less damage to both your products and equipment. Urethanes can be engineered to be softer but most urethanes can only displace and not compress which is a key factor in correcting an impact issue.

Corrosion problems are most often very unique to the material causing the corrosion. There are both rubbers and urethane that are chemically engineered to fix this issue. So one of the main things to look at is the piece of equipment you are trying to protect. Rubber coatings are primarily fairly labor intensive to apply whether you are vulcanizing or cold bonding the coating in place. Urethanes can be both cast (poured) into place or sprayed on. Casting allows for a much thicker coating but spraying is better suited for more three dimensional objects to be coated.

Other things can come into play like temperature and UV resistance. Urethanes do much better with the lower temperatures where rubber is better suited for higher ones. If the liners or coatings are outside a rubber will break down much faster than a urethane. Once again both rubber and urethane can be engineered to better any of these qualities but it is always more cost efficient to stay with the product that better performs in its general form.