nitrogen in tires

orange150

orange150

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 20, 2005
Location
Fairfax City, VA
this site says that nitrogen is better to run in tires for these reasons:
  • Less inflation pressure loss
  • Reduced wheel corrosion
  • Prevents inner-liner rubber deterioration by oxidation
  • Tires run cooler
  • Increases tread life
  • Increases fuel mileage
  • Helps prevent uneven wear

interesting...
 
We race cars every sat. night at south boston speedway in va. and we run nitrogen in our tires. Less pressure build up when the tire gets hot, and the tires run about 20 degrees cooler vs. air. I have set up sheets to prove this. I cannot vouch for the other claims but those two are proveable.
 
I call bullshit.

Regular old air is 78.1% nitrogen.

There might be some truth to their statements... but not enough to make a bit of difference. Reduced rubber deterioration? Reduced corrosion? Yeah, because people have huge problems with wheels rusting through from the inside out, and tires dryrotting the wrong-way round.

It's not enough for you to worry about....
 
Shawn is right. You might get some benefits from the nitrogen being dry versus compressed air coming from an air compressor with no dryer (as most of us don't use a dryer on CA). Otherwise the rest is a myth, and the writeup doesn't even have good science to back it up.

Below is an email from a fellow Mogger on the topic:

"The difference between expansion coefficient for dry air (0.003744 cm
Hg/deg C) and that for dry nitrogen (0.003720 cm Hg/deg C) is way less
than 1% - looked it up in the Handbook of Chemistry a few months ago.
If there's water vapor (like 100% humidity at 37 deg C, temp of human
body) in the compressed air, then the expansion coefficient is somewhat
larger, but still small. If there is liquid water droplets in the air,
then the difference can get really big, if the temperature change range
crosses the boiling point of water at the pressure in the tire.

Three other, perhaps more important, considerations:

(1) There is a bit of Argon in Air (0.93%). Being an inert,
mono-atomic molecule, it finds it way right trough rubber tubes/ tires,
given enough time. Loose it all from a tire with 100 psi of air in it
initially, and the pressure drops by about 1 psi.

(2) The oxygen in air is, surprise!, an oxidizer. Oxidizers support
combustion - fast (fire or explosion), or slow (rusting, corrosion,
degradation of rubber). How well oxygen supports combustion is a
strong function of how much of it there is about, i.e. the partial
pressure of oxygen. For dry air at sea level, one Bar, that's about
20% of a Bar = 0.2 Bar, since air has about 21% oxygen (call it 20% to
keep it easy). If you put 30 psi = 2 Bar in your tires, at sea level,
then the absolute partial pressure of O2 in the tires is 20% of 3 Bar =
0.6 Bar. Not so bad. But, put 300 psi = 20 Bar in your tires and you
have over 6 Bar of O2 partial pressure. That's high enough to make
steel rust and rubber degrade pretty fast!

(3) Use an oil lubricated compressor to pump up your 300-400 psi tires
and you now have both a finely atomized fuel (the oil vapor, or maybe
even just a bit of rubber dust) and a LOT of oxidizer (6+ Bar of O2) in
your tires. It's a Bomb! Add a bit of heat - land your plane on the
carrier deck - and it goes off! BOOM!

If I put over 100 psi in my new Mog tires, I might consider using dry
N2. Otherwise, forget it. It's really not an issue when you are
munching along at less than 20 mph in the Altar Dunes with 10 psi in
the tires, or even cruising down the freeway at < 65 mph with 30 psi in
'em."
 
kilby said:
I can see temperature being a marginal issue on a race car at continuous high speed... but on a crawler??? Nah. I wouldn't lose sleep over that.
Click to expand...

Temperature is a rather large issue on a racecar. If it is a hot day, that 20 degrees cooler running temperature would be a good advantage.

On a crawler, it wouldn't matter a bit.
 
on a race car yes huge difference pressure and temp changes dramatically change the size of the tire causing the cars handling to change radically but riding at 3 mph over rocks i really dont see much benifit for the cost
 
The temp decrease using n2 is a somewhat marginal issue - you can adjust compounds to control the heat buildup.

The racecar tire benefits are more about how predictably the temp rises from cold inflation, and how much less the pressure rises from cold inflation than using air.

Hard to setup a chassis if you have no idea about how the tires will behave... Thought with Hoosier's quality control and lack thereof, ya might as well run humid air.

But back to the point - it's useless for US. If anything, we WANT the tires to heat up!
 
yeah i was just reading that same article.

rich hit it dead on, hot tires=more traction. friction is a byproduct of more traction and creates heat.

what do drag cars run in their tires?
 
I fill mine with helium to counter some of the weight of my bronco :rolleyes:



:D



Theres probibly 500 other thing more important to address on any given vehicle that trumps what you fill your tires with.....right? SURELY


I've read in a few magazines that several people actually put fluid and weights in their tires not....whats the deal with that?

Splain Lucy! Yes I realize it's to get the C.O.G. down..but is that only on real light rigs?
 
CasterTroy said:
Splain Lucy! Yes I realize it's to get the C.O.G. down..but is that only on real light rigs?
Click to expand...

Bingo. The water is ALWAYS at the lowest area on the tire due to gravity. The amount of "help" is certainly debatable.
 
until you get really off center aka steep climb and then the water/antifreeze/equal goes to the lowest point in the tire which is now to the rear of the contact patch causing a weight shift backwards that you really dont need especially if you are already bouncing. just somthing to think about
 
We run Nitrogen in our aircraft (and most all aircraft except bug smashers) tires due to flammability and stability since the tires is going from 30 below to blazing hot at the end of the roll out after max braking. I think NASCAR runs it for the above mentioned temp problems. I'd bet top NHRA classes use it to. I think marketing it to everyday commuters is basically a scame for the tire store to make a little extra. Do your tires stay mounted long enough to actually worry corrosion? What happens when your tires low and there is no disigner brand nitrogen available for your tire? You just corrupted your pure N2 inside your tire with filling station air :) .
 
Here are some quotes of a mag I got at college called "Tommorow's Technician" Nitrogen in tires has been around since 1968 when a guy in Texas named Dr. Larry Sperberg stated that tires wear out from the inside out and he called this process "chemical degredation." "Sperberg focused on the negative impact of moisture introduced into a tire via undrained compressor tanks." "This moisture-laden air works its way into and through the tire cord body, causing heat, expansion, and loss of strength and elasticity." Also causing corrosion of the wheels. "Carrying promises of longer tire life, better fuel mileage, improved road handling, better inflation pressure maitenence, elimination of oxidation and rust, and improved truck tire retreadability - not to mention increased revenue - n2 generating/dispensing equipment have become HOT products in the industry." "A dry, inet gas, n2's main benfit is its molecular structure: n2 molecules are considerably larger than o2 molecules, so they dont permeate a tire nearly as quickly. O2 can pass through the tire 3-4 times faster than n2." "The key reason pro race teams use n2 is convenience. In tank form, n2 is portable and can easily be moved from the garages to the pit areas. Because it's moisture free, n2 is easy on expensive air tools. And, because it is non-flammable unlike pure o2, n2 is safe to use. In terms of race performance, cooler-running tires help stretch out pit stops and provide a more consistent footprint. Just how much a daily commuter will benefit from a cooler-running tire is up for grabs though. Although the claims being made for N2 are effectivlet true, the real reward for a passenger tire user will vary a bit, some say. It's a bit like people who take vitamin pills - some notice a definite difference, while others don't notice anything, even though the vitamins are working their magic." There you go verbatim from the article of the key elements. I say for what we're doing no need to bother.
 
How many tires have you thrown away with good tread?
due to carcase corrosion?
how many rims have rusted through from the inside out.

it's just for bling factor

and how are you going to spray Ether in a tire filled with
nitrogen and reseat the bead? :D no boom :mad:

nothing wrong with using nitrogen if you got it but running out to get
it for the mentioned reasons is well kind of impulsive buying right.

Somebody says I need it and I took their word for it.
how many mods have I made to my rig because of the
same reason only to find out I didn't really need them.
 
Though i'd put in my pennies worth.

Well, I have read through your post and thought I may have something to add that's a unique perspective on the subject. I'm actually the youngest son of Larry Sperberg and having been around his work all my life and this debate is almost second nature to me. If you’ll indulge me, pull up a beer I’m going to get on a soap box for a couple seconds. :beer: :beer:
With concern to most of the posts, most are taken from the stand point of immediate or right now as it’s happening and a while in the “action of perspective†stand point; it is true that most organized racing of sorts usually run nitrogen for it's convenience and stability as well as it's predictability and consistency factors.
But how nitrogen affect average people in their every days is different. People in Nascar and IRL and other big racing organizations use it for the afore mentioned reasons for those main benefits as well as others. As it trickles down to the rest of us it's hard to see why it's beneficial and superior filler.. Reasons are simple. We use our tires for more than one event at a time. Professionals use several sets of tires at any one given event. Most weekend road warriors will maybe get a couple of races out of a particular set or unit. (maybe a season if their lucky) People like you and me it's a harder sell cause it's simply not sold right. For the crawlers, mudders, boggers and sand devils out there you feel it’s harder to justify cause you’re going slow, not building up heat and so forth. For the most part I think there was one maybe two posts that even mention outside forces and nature. We don't live in controlled environments, we live in the world and as your oxygen filled tires get old and oxidized they get harder and breakdown faster. Most guys out there have had blow outs, bursts tires, punctured tires and the other types off tire failure on the trail or to and from it. Most of the time it's not on a new set of tires. And good portions of tire failure can be attributed to fatigue and breakdown of rubber compounds on a microscopic level. An easy way t think of this is cheese, specifically Swiss. now Baby Swiss has smaller holes through out it. this is the natural tire as it's produced and manufactured. there are microscopic holes in everything. Now as Swiss gets older the micro organisms continue to do their thing making these holes bigger and the bigger they get the stability of the block decreases cheese also gets harder. Both of these are just like tires as tired get older and as more oxidation happens it weakens the tires walls surface tread. it permeated the cell body and can create separation from the tire body and the cording. and eventually breakdown. so pop goes the tire and off to the store with you to buy more. Now nitrogen is not a cure (there is no cure, but it's a aid in your favor, like medication over time it can help you and your tires get better or stay healthy. Individual examples (and I’m lumping here) are muds/bogs/crawlers you guys buy your tires to be bigger, somewhat soft to ensure maximum grip, bigger (I said it twice cause they are quite big) and wide foot prints to ensure grip or taller walls to allow you get reach when flinging the muck. So after a year of two and a couple of seasons have passed. Beside the obvious tread wear, your tires don’t seem as soft as they were when you bought them. They don’t bounce like they used to when your diving. They don’t have as much give or play. Most of this is due to oxidation. Oxygen and water molecules permeating through the rubber and freezing when its cold, oxidizing because that what oxygen does naturally, otherwise we wouldn't have to have paint on cars. It weakens the wall bodies and generally puts you at risk on your everyday drive and on the trail. Glazing and hardening your tires so that grip you need for your foothold would keep you on the rocks instead of flipping head over ass. For the Duners and Dessert Monkeys you pretty much deal with the glazing and decresed deep cutting/scooping aspects of your tires in the sand and byproducts from oxidation. Unless your doing it in the winter too in which you are really hard-core and are getting the full effects of crappy tire performance.

As for passenger vehicles what if the Firestone recall could have been reduced because the industry used nitrogen instead of oxygen and the tire separation wasn’t as severe and they were able to catch it at a cost of fewer lives and less hardship. What if goods we buy weren’t affected as much by the cost of transportation (upkeep on vehicles is one of the biggest costs in the professional trucking world. And truck tires at a several hundred a tire is costly) {most large fleets are maintained with nitrogen by the way to help reduce such costs} As for you or me people solutions, most people don’t replace their tires every one to two ½ years like they should. (optimal of course) They go three, four or when ever the damn things run down. But when you go this long it’s worse cause oxidation and degradation is not a linear thing. It doesn’t keep happening at the same rate until you take them off and get new ones. It exponential and it’s on a curve. In the beginning it takes a lot to get them to start to wear out but as time passes they wear out quicker and quicker and degraded faster and faster. We run them every day on and off several times a day constantly heating and cooling, heating and cooling. And as the water heats and cools it does its job and wear’s them out. Then it becomes that blowout that we’ve seen on the highway that the family was inside when it happened (it could be yours, is it really worth the risk??) (I don't recall the figures but there are thousands upon thousands of accidents and fatlities created by premature tire failure every year)

I’m not here to sell nitrogen inflation and definitely not to sell tires, I hate spending the money just like everyone else, but I’m also aware what it can do and what can be the costs both physically and monetarily; I choose to spend the money and be proactive to fight it off as much as I can.. We are not a proactive or forward thinking society and hardest thing about it, what can be done about it? Sad to say at the present not a whole hell of a lot, gas stations won’t install nitrogen fillers because they’re too costly or rather they can’t make their money back as quickly. (in northern Europe and Scandinavia they have begun filling stations with nitrogen fillers as early as 86/87 [that was a push by private industry and the Gov. due to increased accidents in inclement and cold weather climates for improved safety on their roads and highways, I guess they figured frozen tires on frozen roads is a bad thing] but oxygen is still the prevalent choice for stations, In the United States I don’t think there is one nitrogen generator for tire fills in the whole country). As with most things it comes down to money and how much it will cost and how much can I make from it, it will never be about the benefits.

I hope you find this useful and most importantly informative. Information and knowledge are the only way to combat anything. For a farther in-depth look, Google or Ask Jeeves on my dad’s name, (Lawrence R. Sperberg and variants of it) you’ll find several sites with his papers on Nitrogen inflation and other such things. Rally your communities, your local 4x4 store and passenger vehicle supply stores. If you and your friends don’t start asking what other can help you do to keep you and your family safer, they never will of their own accord. Also, if it became the standard instead of an “alternative option†it would be become cheaper.

I leave you with this. If you do not begin to take your own life into your own hands and do what you can to protect it, who do you expect will?

:driver: Thanks guy’s I look forward to seeing you on the trails. :driver:

R.

(if you though this was wild, start looking up hydrogen combustion engines that use most of the same engines we use now and which will be on the roads in Europe in 2006, [dual-fuel capable BMW 7 series] but yet the big three are pushing lower horsepower, wastefull energy, more costly petroleum derived hydrogen fuel cell pellets that will be here in maybe 2010?? Replacing the entire way cars are manufactured and runs instead of just changing the fuel it runs on?? Does that make sense to you?? They're going to make billions though, at least they'll make money. Too bad we won't, we're just going to have to pay for it.)
 
holy long post batman! the one thing you missed though is convenience (sp). i think it was mentioned before that all that nitrogen is going to waste every time we air down at the trailhead. and who carries a nitro tank with them when they are 4 wheeling? this isnt paintball... also, by the time dry rot and oxidation has set in on a set of off road tires, they are probably on their last leg anyway as far as tread and sidewalls go. just my 2c
 
Oh please not again. Enough with the nitrogen in the tires and how your putting your family at risk by not doing so. Please feel free to make an appointment and stop by to see my recapped tires on the Mog. I won't even guess as to their age, and they continue to perform flawlessly. Oxidation and aging...give me a break.

Exponential and on a curve...thanks for letting us know that an exponential function is not linear. Us hicks ain't got the smarts about such thangs.

And compressed air, not oxygen, is the method of choice for the majority of users out there, of which 78% is nitrogen.
 
Dude.. seriously, give it a break. we WANT the tires to heat up. They grip when they're hot. (insert video of Greg boiling the hides then popping right over a rock)

P.S. Tires normally come apart from the outside, not the inside.

P.P.S. That whole firestone crap was because of ignorant-ass drivers that don't check the pressure, and cheap tires that can't handle a vehicle that's within spitting distance of max GVW when 2 people are aboard.

P.P.P.S. You'd probably shit a brick if you saw the liquid cocktail that's inside my tires.
 
the oxidation between a rubber compound in nitrogen and of a rubber compound in your daily fill station air. ( or your own compressed air for that matter) is not going to come into play for at least several years.

more like about thirty or forty years so.take how you will.

once more I have worked in the rubber and urethane industry from about the time I was fourteen until I was like 31 so that's a few years of experience.

in my "take it as you want" opinion it isn't going to give an advantage or disadvantage for that matter.(in a wheeling situation) All the above metioned reasons are most likely valid but wouldn't come into play for several years and certainly the tires would be worn out before they are ever corroded from the inside out. ultraviolet rays are the biggest killers of tire carcases. (don't believe me) go look in a junk yard at tires that haven't had air in them for years yet "wow" they are still dry rotted.

and as for heating them up for better traction thats a surface contact heat caused by friction. and will heat the carcase and tire from the outside in not the other way around. now the air compared to nitrogen would hold the heat longer and adversly change your air pressure very slightly. and I mean very slightly in a tire that has sometimes as little as 5- 12 lbs in the situations we are talking about where a half pound to a pound variation isn't going to matter. since the next creek crossing will adversly effect the pressure in the oposite direction.

one of the biggest inner liner killers isn't the air they contain, but the amount of oil that got transferred to the air through the compression and filtration cycle. if anything will kill your tires it's going to be the oil your compressor allowed by.

my two informed cents
 
oh yeah one last thing the last three blow outs I had or flats for that matter have been from road debris or a pinched tire between a rock and rim?

as far as the trucking industry is concerned. they use an extremly hard sidewall configuartion with multiple plies (they don't want sidewall flex) and an extremly hard compound in the rubber. so to them it may just be an advantage on something that spends it's entire life at highway speed in every condition out there.

For some of them driving from canada to florida. that is kind of extreme temperature variables don't you think. and most of the time they are carrying around 60-80,000lb loads with tires pressures way up there as well. so their need for the advantage is there. (the reason they use nitrogen is for stability more so than safety)

and guess what thier biggest cause of tire failure is. for those who guessed (it's road debris)
 
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