Cool tool

But there is hardly a rash of tyres coming apart either, is there?
My "one liners" are based on testing I did in a hot climate over a period of six months. There was no conclusive evidence EITHER way, so even if there is any benefit, I found it to be so small that it's immeasurable.
Do you really keep the tyres on your Ferrari for so long that they are in danger of coming apart? No. I didn't think so.....

 

Well now THAT'S INTERESTING! What was the nature of the testing?
Can you share any of what you learned?

I'm not saying it's some huge thing, I'm no nitrogen evangelist, but since many of these cars are only driven hundreds of miles a year, as a matter of fact, I'd say it's relevant that tires can last a many years before they wear down. When I get my car back on the road and put the new fronts on I'll have to go test and see if the rears have gotten all aged hard.

 

We did some testing on road cars and race cars. Temps and pressures involving thermocouples and aftermarket TPMS. Done in conjunction with one of the Cypriot tyre importers on same aged tyres. The track stuff was for Achna raceway, unfortunately the data from the track cars became corrupted after it was discovered that geometry changes had taken place on the subject vehicles.
High road surface temps out in Cyprus meant many owners became interested in the reported pressure stability at high ambients. We had matched spec cars running same geometry and same batch aged tyres and over the course of six months we couldn't prove stability improvement nor could we disprove it. We had the most accurate gear we could find at the time and we couldn't repeat results conclusively.

 

Bob,

Sounds great. So why don't you buy one of these puppies so Paul and I can do the tires in our Ferraris and Jags??!! LOL

 

Interesting, so it appears you were trying to gather data to support the most agreed-upon aspect of N2 inflation, being that pressure doesn't change as much with N2 fill as with air when tires get hot, but couldn't. I'm not sure that relates too much to the things I've learned from looking at all of this other research. I never knew we needed to prove the pressure stability of N2, I thought that was universally accepted; it seems to be accepted by race teams and NASA for the space shuttle.
I checked out your website; I'm jealous of your life, but suspect that Ford had a much larger budget and more engineers that know more about tires running their research program in light of the Firestone tire fiasco (brief recap if it wasn't news there: Fords with Firestone Wilderness A/T tires were having blowouts and accidents at a surprising rate and making the national news. In the end, if I recall, Firestone paid Ford $1.1 billion for causing the problem and ended the partnership dating back to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.) They were running track tests 20 or 24 hours a day under the lights at the track in Arizona for many months that one summer, as well as having dozens more people working in the scientific research labs in Dearborn. It was a real big deal. That's what a lot of the reports I've been relaying here came from.

 

Your post has just illustrated my point nicely. If it takes years and millions of dollars to prove , yet it can't be replicated by controlled testing, at the level for which the application is being marketed, then it is of such insignificance it is a waste of money. We are not talking nascar, space shuttle, f1 or old Firestone tires. We are talking about useful traits of nitrogen in sports cars. My point is if you can't measure any, there is none to measure...

 

It's worse than useless... N2 is heavier than O2, so you are increasing your unsprung weight.

 

In order for their to be a measurable difference, pure N2 or Air would have to disobey the ideal gas law. Ain't going to happen in real world conditions. Maybe if you have water condensed in the tire, but that's a different problem that needs to be solved.

 

It seems like lots of people that have the resources have found this to be the ideal way to get around any issues with the IDEAL gas law in the real world. That's the difference between physicists and engineers.

 

I have two cylinders of Nitrogen in my garage I use for Motion Picture Camera repairs.

I have an air compressor to inflate my tires.

Running nitrogen in your tires is over hyped unless you are running a Formula 1 team.

Dry compressed air is pretty consistent. Most people don't use water traps or drain the condensed water out of their compressor tanks. I live in the land of single digit humidity and drain my tank every month. I have NEVER gotten no water to drain.

 

I spent 30 years working in the fine particle manufacturing industry (toner/pharma) and all of this process was done with compressed air---on the order of 5-10kCfm at 8 bar nominal--We obsessed and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on generating pure dry clean air--foreignsubstance/oil/H2O in the ppm (less than 100 ideally) Any increase in this number caused hand wringing trauma etc etc--we/i used refrerated air dryers -oil mist eliminators etc etc etc --you get the point--the biggest single point of failure in all this was the initial shot of air out of the hose/pipe whatever---you dry the air out by cooling it down dramatically and forcing the oil and water as the adsorption ability of the air increases greatly as the air is heated up--sadly when you compress air you heat it up ergo theres the problem--so what you end up having to do is create some method of purging all the lines to dry before process use--drop legs/constant usage(a leak works well for this but is expensive to and hard to control) -anyhow when you take a blow gun at the end of hose and squeeze the trigger more often the not you get a splash of moisture--if you are filling tire guess where the moisture went---this is also extremely affected by the local environmental conditions--intake air to compressor hot vs cold wet vs dry---in summary most places put separators or filters on compressed air lines but hardly anyone changes them or maintains them so the air is of who knows condition

 

That's right! Its really expensive for personal use. There are many nitrogen stations around the area though with reasonable cost.

 

The very interesting Ford research that Don posted links to readily concedes that the two reasons commonly thought to be the primary benefits of N2 filling - pressure stability with heat and pressure stability over time - are not very relevant for street cars (or by implication even track driving).

But their findings potentially do support N2 fills, particularly for track driving: they found that the oxygen in the air, combined with heat / time, degraded the rubber layer that holds the belts in place. They didn't conduct road tests nor did they study high-performance tires, but this sort of degradation would be consistent with a tire "going away" or starting to feel soft while still maintaining the correct pressure and tread temps and having lots of tread life remaining, something I have definitely experienced in track driving events.

F1 teams have lots of other reasons to fill with N2, but the Ford research gives a strong hint that further study of N2 fills for track driving may well show it has substantial benefits in terms of tire life. In short, it's not about removing the moisture nor preventing deflation; it's about preventing oxidation of the rubber internal to the tire structure.

The Ford study doesn't show a definitive conclusion for track driving, but it does show that N2 fills shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.... Unfortunately, unless the difference in tire life is substantial, it will be difficult to show this without expensive professional controlled testing!

-frank

 

I work in the aviation industry and we exclusively use N2 in all military and commercial aviation tires. It is more stable and the tires last longer especially at the elevated temperatures of hard braking and landing of a 400K lb airplane. Of course an aircraft tire goes from -50c to
+100c in less than a minute at landing.

We abuse tires a lot more than you ever would in a passenger car.

Its probably not worth any real money in the normal world to fill your wife's car tires with N2.

If you are tracking a lot or have access to N2 for cheap or relatively cheap, it IS better for your tires.