Working of Nitrous Oxide boosters in a car!

Hi Guys,

A few days ago I was hearing podcast in my iPod about ‘How Nitrous oxide boosters work?’ released by ‘How stuff works’ website. I’ve seen Nitrous Oxide Boosters in few games and movies including Need for Speed (game), Dhoom, Fast and the Furious (movies). I have never thought about the technology inside that. I was thinking that Nitrous Oxide is a fuel and it has high combustion rate or something like sort of that. But the reality was much more amazing.

Nitrous Oxide cylinders inside a car

Basically there are two theories behind the boost.

1st Theory

Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) splits into Nitrogen and Oxygen at 300 degree Celsius. Therefore a ½ mole of oxygen is introduced. Air consist 21% oxygen and this addition makes it as 33%. This enrichment of oxygen provides more burning of fuel and hence higher power emission and higher speed.

2nd Theory

Nitrous Oxide has some other effect too. It provides a significant cooling to the intake air. Decrease in temperature increases the air’s density, which means more oxygen will be present in the intake air.

In both the theories, more oxygen is taken inside the cylinder and hence more burning takes place. This can be imagined with the candle experiment we studied long ago. Keep a burning candle inside a closed container. It burns until oxygen is present and then turns off. If there is more oxygen, it would burn for more time. Nitrous Oxide increases the amount of oxygen.

NOS system for a car

Disadvantage of Nitrous Oxide System

Nitrous oxide is very bulky and we need a lot of Nitrous Oxide for the engine. Normally the Nitrous Oxide is compressed and stored as a liquid. Still then, it occupies a large amount of space. Therefore a car can carry only a few minutes of Nitrous Oxide and the driver must use it carefully. It’s normally activated using a button (you must have seen it if you have seen race movies like Fast and the Furious).

Another disadvantage is that, due to large amount of release of Oxygen more pressure is applied and the engine’s cylinder may be damaged. Nitrous Oxide is not allowed legally by transport organizations. Even the major racing groups have banned usage of Nitrous oxide in their races.

Nitrous is mainly produced by Nitrous Oxide Systems (NOS) and hence is also known as NOS.

External Links

How Stuff Works: How does nitrous oxide help an engine perform better?

Nitrous- Wikipedia

Happy Reading!!!

P.S: The image used is the nitrous oxide boosters fitted in a Volvo concept car. Image credit belong to Volvo and Google

Things that crossed my way!

Hi Guys,

I’m quite busy since my V semester classes begun. This time, the classes are quite boring. In the past two weeks I gained lot of experience as I along with my friends went through some of the old streets of the city. I have never visited those streets before. We had been busy working for a mini project competition and it is quite sad that the project is on the verge of failure. Hoping that things get alright in the upcoming days.

Chess and me

Chess requires lot of logical thinking. My brother taught me to play chess when i was 7 or 8. We played a few times and I kept losing all those time. Then both of us became uninterested and we left playing. After that I’ve played chess very rarely with some of my friends. In the past few months, I started to play again with computer. There are 10 levels and I normally choose 1st or 2nd level. I lose some and win some, but all those things marginally. The magic occurred a few days before. I was playing in level 1 and this time I played with different tactics. To my surprise, I was on the upper side right from the start. I finished the game in just 10 minutes after losing just 2 coins. Here I present some of those screenshots.

 

The biggest comedy was that, I lost the next game which I played in level 2.

Salt- Movie

Yesterday evening I went to the movie Salt along with my friends. I was half minded about going to the movie, but as my friends compelled I went to the movie. It was not a very great movie. A few action sequences were good. Apart from that nothing was impressive.The movie was not very clear. The outline was good, but the screenplay made it clumsy. Angelina Jolie is a Russian and she is trained to collapse USA. She joins in CIA as a spy for the Russian rebel group and she is assigned to kill the Russian president visiting USA . Their next plan is to launch nuclear weapons on the Muslim countries and turn them against USA. For reasons unknown Angelina fights against the Russian group. Why she is against them is not explained properly. We came out of the theatre with lot of questions and none was satisfactory of seeing the movie.

White Umbrellas in my home

I woke up on Friday and found some small mushrooms in my garden. I took my camera and captured the mushrooms. The lighting was poor, but I thought, the mushrooms will wither by the time I cam back home in the evening. The pictures were not very brilliant. I publish the photos for your view.

That's it for now.

Happy Reading!!!

Numismatics!

Hi Guys,

For the past 5 years or so, I've been collecting coins. Numismatics is the hobby of collecting coins. For a long time I thought I was a numismatist (a person having numismatics as his hobby). I realised that I don't take any effort to collect coins and so numismatics is not my hobby. But, whenever I come across different type of coins, I add it to my collection. I've approximately 100 coins in my collection. Today I got a new 5 Rs coin and just then i thought of publishing some of the coins in my collection in my blog.

Here I publish the photos of my album as Picasa Web album slideshow.

If you have problems viewing the photos, use this link

Coin Collection!

Happy Viewing!!!