Nitrogen vs Air in Car Tyres

The tread on my car tyres had worn down, so I popped into my local tyre retailer to buy 4 new tyres.

"We can inflate your new tyres with air, or, for an extra $5 per tyre we can fill them with nitrogen gas", the sales person told me, " Nitrogen gas doesn't react with tyre and rim material so your tyres will last longer, it will help maintain the pressure in your tyres so you won't need to check your tyre pressure as often, and it reduces the running temperature of the tyres so your tyres are less likely to explode."

Is this just marketing hype or are there good reasons for choosing to inflate your car tyres with nitrogen instead of air?

Read the March 2020 edition of AUS-e-NEWS to find out more.

Subscribe to AUS-e-NEWS, AUS-e-TUTE's free quarterly newsletter for chemistry teachers and students, at https://www.ausetute.com.au/ausenews.html

Mendeleev's Biggest Failure

2019, the International Year of the Periodic Table, marks the 150^th anniversary of Dmitri Mendeleev's formal presentation of his Periodic Table to the Russian Chemical Society on 6^th March 1869.
His Periodic Table is arguably the most important breakthrough in the history of Chemistry because it not only organised the elements into groups based on their properties, it also continues to allow us to make predictions about the physical and chemical properties of elements.
Yet, despite its predictive capacity, Mendeleev failed to predict an entire group of elements!

Read all about it in the March 2019 issue of AUS-e-NEWS.

Subscribe to AUS-e-TUTE's free quarterly newsletter AUS-e-NEWS at 

https://www.ausetute.com.au/ausenews.html