Anyone know! Thank you.
Nitrogen concentrator machine, here are some:
nitrogen concentrator machine - Search (bing.com)
Fine if it’s free.
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Most important of all is “who cares?” We have a couple of tire/wheel experts around and I’ll be happy to hear their thoughts, but mostly I’ve always thought of it as just another revenue stream option for big tire retailers.
Of note: "Testing conducted independently by Consumer Reports and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that the benefits are more theoretical than practical.
First off, dry air is 78 percent nitrogen"
Personally, I’d rather better drivers ed stuff in the U.S. along with basic things like “how and when to check your tire pressures.” Wishful thinking, I know.
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Nitrogen is a different molecule from the others in the air, so there are several methods to separate it.
- If it has a different boiling point, cool & compress air to liquid form, then distill the N2.
- It has a different weight, so taking advantage of that would work, centrifuge, racing all the molecules through a long pipe, etc. Similar to how uranium 235 was separated from the other isotopes in the 1940’s.
- It probably diffuses faster or slower than the other molecules through certain membranes.
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Good lord, who really ( besides you) cares.
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Bridgestone is the worlds largest automotive tire maker, if it was worth it, then all Firestone retail stores/shops would sell it… No, the end does not justify the means for normal driving, racing maybe, but for normal drivers, not worth it… IIRC, Nitrogen will also leak faster if you pick up a nail or whatever…
Simple corporate economics. Nitrogen tire fills presumably attracts more customers to buy tires at Costco, so it makes sense for Costco to offer it as long as the cost of the nitrogen is less than the extra profit from the customer increase.
I fill themergencyehicles’ tires with strictly 78.08% nitrogen.
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this tendency towards common sense of yours …hmmmm … … lol
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Yes, but what if he told you he exchanges the air in his tires every 3000 miles and leaves the stem valve out overnight to make sure every last molecule of air gets out before refilling them?
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Done according to tire revolutions.
Racers use nitrogen because it is dry with no moisture. Dry air or N2 makes the pressure increase with increasing tire temps more predictable.
And N2 filled pressure bottles are easy to source and cheap. They could use argon or other inert gas and get the same results at a higher cost.
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Does it do anything to prevent deterioration of the rubber due to age on the inside? Modern tires are lacking some protective additives that made old ties last decades before cracking.
Proponents claim it prevents oxidation of the rubber with no proof to back it up that I have ever seen.
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Tires age from the outside (UV, ozone), not the inside. And I saw plenty of dry rotted tire back in the '70s.
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I doubt that they do any of those things. Buying gaseous nitrogen in bottles is likely how they do it. I doubt that they buy liquid nitrogen. It can be very dangerous, too dangerous I think, to use in an auto shop.
When I was a student engineer in aerospace, I would bring home a thermos bottle of LN2.
Girlfriend and I would mix cream skimmed from raw cows milk with sugar, vanilla and touch of almond extract.
We would carefuly pour in the liquid nitrogen while stirring and in one minute - ice cream!
(Atmospheric N2 is 78.084%)
No, see my link and photo. They don’t need pure N2, just mostly N2, so there’s equipment that will provide it. Looks like they typically use membrane separation.
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Below is the machine I have used for 15 years. Connect shop air hose for air supply, controls are battery powered, recharge once a month, very low operating cost. Filtering isn’t very fast, there is a 60-gallon reservoir tank on the back of the machine. Connect hoses to all four tires, set the pressure and walk away, tires are purged, inflated, purged again and inflated to the selected pressure.
A shop I worked at in the past had a liquefied nitrogen tank, refilled once each week, I believe it was refilled by the same truck that services bars and restaurants.
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How many people have tried to get coffee out of that thing??.. 
I can just see some old timers trying to figure it out, when not in use…
Must be pretty big to have a 60 gallon tank on it, my air compressor has a 60 gallon tank and it is pretty big, I guess it is much bigger then it looks in the picture…
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