gas station/tire joint near me does it for $5 a tire,claims it makes the tires run cooler,and last longer...that's $20 I'll never spend....doubt seriously it makes a helluva lot of difference,but I dunno..
It doesn't make a difference on street cars. Race car guys use straight nitrogen because it doesn't change with temperature. Regular air expands and contracts with changes in temperature, thus changing tire pressure as tires heat and cool. Nitrogen filled tires aren't affected this way and air pressure stays static even after many hard laps
Any gas expands with heat,plain and simple. Stand law of pressure,volume,and temperature. Bottled Nitrogen is dry,it doesn't have any moisture in it. Moisture inside tires will cause them to build more pressure, faster, when they get hot. Pretty much overkill on the street.
When I was racing oval track I used nitrogen as the tire pressures didn't seem to vary as much as with compressed air. The moisture in compressed air causes erratic pressures as the tires heat up therefore affecting the stagger and the inherent spring rate in the tires. Of course this was quite minimal and would probably not even be noticed on a street car, but important in the ch***is setup of a race car.
When I was in the Navy(a LONG time ago),the planes we were flying(McDonnell F-4's)used nitrogen in the tires for a couple of reasons;one being the temperature was a bit more stable.Of course they were running pressures of 450 psi on the main mounts and after making a half dozen or so simulated carrier landings(AKA slamming a 20,000 lb.plus aircraft onto the runway just before the point of crashing)the $3,000 tires were junk. Another thing you had to be really careful of:there were two types of nitrogen that were used in the armed forces:water pumped and oil pumped.This referred to the lubricant used in the pump used to fill the bottles(5,000 psi).You could NOT use oil pumped nitrogen because the oil vapors were not only corrosive to the rubber,it was a potential explosion hazard. Personally I think the use of nitrogen in p***enger car tires is about on a par with Fire Injectors(a quack replacement for spark plugs in the 50's)and those little propeller gismos under the base of the carburetors(Mini-Superchargers).Just my take.
Yes -- 78% or so is my understanding. Only an incremental difference. Probably not worth the $ for a street car, unless you drive lots of highway miles in high temperatures...in that case it might reduce tire wear slightly.
well people use nitrogen in race cars because when the car catches on fire the tires dont explode the way they do when they are full of oxygen. Nitrogen doesn wick moisture in also, plus the molecuels(sp) are larger so if you run low pressure on a slick with a beed lock they wont leak air. it has really no benefits on a street car unless your car catches on fire. thats the reason maufacturers use nitrogen in their shocks, its nonvolitale so it dont go boom.
i bet if you filled them with helium that would help. every 100lbs is like 1/10 of a second in the 1/4 mile.................oh wait hydrogen is lighter than helium hmmm??? see were i'm going with this? its not worth youre time or money it sounds like something a ricer would do to his honda .
Costco uses nitrogen in their tire shops when they fill tires. According to my girlfriend who works in the shop it doesn't really make a difference beyond what's mentioned already. But if you're looking for it, that's one place you can find it.
Am I missing something here or does this post make almost no sense? Since when is air (the air we breathe outside, and what gets ****ed into a compressor) pure oxygen? As mentioned, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen any way, as well as carbon dioxide, oxygen and some other gases (especially if you're living in NJ). "Air" is not flammable and won't cause your tires to explode in a fire, unless you fill them up with that fix-a-flat stuff that uses propane as a propellant. Even oxygen itself is not flammable, however, the more oxygen that is exposed to flame, the hotter and faster that fire will consume it's fuel source, and the fire will burn until that source of oxygen runs out. Remember your fire triangle?
its useless..dont spend money on it! another bogus marketing strategy..that dont do ****..just another ****ER ploy
The main use is on aircraft. We use it in our tires but that's because of the radical temp changes they see. Not worth doing on a street car.....and besides, how would you add to it when it needs it?
Here is the concept. As said the nitrogen is supplied dry. Nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide etc all follow the ideal gas laws as to expansion and contraction with heat pv=nRt (pressure times volume equals number of molecules times a constant times the temperature). So all of these gases will act exactly the same way to a temperature change. As said above though moisture (water) does not act like an ideal gas. It is a solid at 32 deg F and a gas at 212 deg F at normal air pressure (the true gases are gases over much larger temperature ranges). So moisture in the tire will expand over driving temps far more than a dry gas especially in cold climates. Another concept is that the oxygen in air is more reactive with metal rims esp aluminum and magnesium. Does it work? I would say it likely does. Is it worth it? I wouldn't do it. I was offered by a local tire guy and went around with the arguments with him. All of my cars have steel wheels which thus far have lasted as many as 50 years with no problems. He was unable identify the water aspect of the whole issue and I refuse to buy anything led only by a sales pitch. I even argued the size issue with him. Oxygen is actually a larger atom than nitrogen, although both gases like to have a pair of atoms together and nitrogen ends up a tiny bit bigger that way -- it has to deal with how close the atoms can actually get to each other. I said though that if size did matter why not use carbon dioxide? 2 oxygens and a carbon atom, much bigger than the nitrogen "molecule", the oxygen is covalently bound to the carbon so it is non-reactive. So ever the smart *** I win right? Well I later asked him to fix a hole (slow leak) in one of his tires that came with a road hazard warranty, he said no hole, you should have put nitrogen in the tires, you know it leaks less than air
I'm guessing that maybe Plowboy consulted on this? http://extension.missouri.edu/explore/envqual/wq0252.htm The arguments look pretty complete. At 78% for nitrogen in the atmosphere, I think that as long as the compressor has a water seperator or trap, I'll settle for "air".
Time out. Many new cars have these tire pressure sensors and the variation of pressure caused by temperature ups and downs when using compressed atmosphere won't allow them to work correctly. This is what caused my daughters new BMW's low tire monitoring system to freak
You're absolutely right. The idea isn't ******** at all. When my FSAE team was competing in California, we realized that our car was driving very differently after several laps on the hot track (114 degrees). After the event we checked our air pressure and realized we went from 13 psi (before run, filled in the shaded pit area) to 17 psi. 4 pounds makes a tremendous impact in the handling of the car, which caused a lot of front end push in the corners. Had we filled the tires with nitrogen instead of regular air, it wouldn't have been an issue
I like to deflate and reinflate my tires whenever I go up in the mountains to high al***ude because up there the air is thinner and therefore lighter and then the wheels weigh less.
I have a refrigerated line drier on my compressor so I get very little it any moisture in the air lines which makes it cheaper than nitrogen and drier than regular compressed air. Plus I don't have to go anywhere to "buy" compressed gas for a tire. Best of both worlds...
Charles Gas Law says that when temperature increases- volume increases, when temp decreases - volume decreases. This applies to all gases but to what degree is largely dependent on its density. I teach Chemistry in High school and we just finished gas laws last week. Wouldn't make much any noticable different in a street tire.
Pressure Volume Temperature. The volume of the tire doesn't change, so when you change the temperature,you change the pressure. That should be pretty basic for engineering students.
However not all gases expand at the same rate/volume at same temperature change. Again wrong. (see above) We use nitrogen to check for small leaks in refrigeration systems because the rate of expansion and contraction is negligible with temperature change as the day warms or cools. However refrigeration gas could see a 50 psi or more change thru out the day.
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