Darn, I'd sure love to engage all these intellectual dudes here in Fatwallet. The debate sure looks vicious. I'd prefer however to keep my mouth shut and let the issue die down. For heaven's sake, all of this was created due to nitrogen in your tire. It's beneficial, but not practical. 4$ a pop? COme on, there's plenty of ordinary air for everyone. Besides, ordinary air already contains a hefty amount of N2 (78%) in it, so why bother? The performance gains are so neglegible.

Cool post. This is what the race car drivers use to inflate their tires.

Now if costco tire center would only offer wheel alignments along w/ their other tire service.

Pato said:Now if costco tire center would only offer wheel alignments along w/ their other tire service.

they're going to align mine for free after a few 1000 miles (after installation).

interesting offer, OP!!


[now the rest of you check your degrees at the door and have your nerd discussions in OT.]

I fill mine with Coke. It's not cheap, but it sure is fizzy at 60 mph

Man, Took five pages and no one has really said that all gasses expand at the same rate.

I'll even post some chem history to back it up.

All gases expand or contract at the same rate with changes in temperature its know as Charles law.

Moister does affects pressure with heat so dry air is good.

However, one reason it's used in airplanes and the likes: Tires needing to take more heat are made with more natural rubber and less synthetic, natural rubber is a little more reactive and thus breaks down a little easier. Using inert gasses on the inside helps slow that a little bit.

-JTP

Think Costco will fill a coffin with nitrogen?

Stenosis

osuuma said:Alternative gases for tire inflation:

CH4 - Methane - You can tell your tire is leaking because of the cow toot smell
H2S - Hydrogen Sulfide - How do you want your eggs? Sunny side up, scrambled, or ROTTEN!
O2 - Oxygen - Get stoned legally.
C3H8 - Propane - "Burn"-outs are the real thing!
H2 - Hydrogen - "Oh, the humanity!!!"
Ne - Neon - With clear tires and high voltage, they glow!
CO2 - Carbon Dioxide - Help the environment by containing green-house gases.
CCl2F2 - Freon - Even if your tires are bald, cupped, and falling apart, they are still "cool".

CH4 MEthane burns just as readily as Propane.
H2S will probably plasticise the rubber.
O2 won't get you stoned as much as NO2, Nitrous, and you can feed it into the engine too. O2 is the reason a whole US astraunat team got burnt to a crisp while still on the ground. NASA used 100% pure oxygen at reduced pressure in space craft. Iron will burn in O2 very rapidly.
I think CO2 is probably your best bet.
Cloro-flouro-carbons will contribute to the ozone layer depletion.

I think the N2 is pure hype. If they use it to reduce the fire hazard, then what about the oxygen on the outside of the tire. Most tire fires are on the outside and not within. Even if there were a fire within the tire, the CO2 produced and contained in the tire would self-extinguish the blaze in a matter of seconds.

I for one, will stick with compressed air for now. The fluctuations are so minimal.

By the way the tire blow outs reported in the past were due to lower tire pressue which created friction within the tire and caused it to heat up and disintegrate. It was the heat of the tire side wall and not the air in the tire that caused it. While Driver's inattentivness caused the roll over, as none of the trucks were able to roll over in simulated blow out situations.

Actually Nitrogen is used in Airplane tires because of the altitude change and how that creates condensation. Imagine this. You fill your 727 tires with saturated air on a humid day. You now climb to 30,000 feet. Along the way your passengers will watch condensation occur on the outside windows, wings, and all the while you'll form a nice big puddle of water in your tires.

Now you decend rapidly and your tire with a 1 pound water "rock" in it hits the runway and goes from 0 to 170mph instantly. That little poof of smoke you see when the tires hit would be more than just a bit of burning rubber

JakeThePimp said:Man, Took five pages and no one has really said that all gasses expand at the same rate.

I'll even post some chem history to back it up.

All gases expand or contract at the same rate with changes in temperature its know as Charles law.

Moister does affects pressure with heat so dry air is good.

However, one reason it's used in airplanes and the likes: Tires needing to take more heat are made with more natural rubber and less synthetic, natural rubber is a little more reactive and thus breaks down a little easier. Using inert gasses on the inside helps slow that a little bit.

-JTP

It seems that nobody remembers PV=nRT from high school. Shame ...
P is pressure, V volume, n anount of gas, T temperature, and R is universal gas constant. This is true for all ideal gasses.
There is also Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures: each gas in a mixture creates pressure as if the other gases were not present. The total pressure is the sum of the pressures created by the gases in the mixture.

A counter-argument would be: Well these formulas are for ideal gasses, and air is not ideal. So the formulas don't apply.

You can look up ideal gas propertieshere:
ideal gass properties
The invalid assumptions deviate significantly at conditions when the gas liquifies. ( e.g. the case of water content in the air). But at normal conditions, the variation is so minimal, that the effect of water condensation vanishes compared to the thermal expansion of the air in the tire.

Bottom line:
Pure N2 in passenger vehicle tires is BS and ripoff.


Reference:

Kinetic Molecular Theory