- Today's subject is no laughing matter.
I'm just kidding, it totally is!
It's laughing gas!
Nitrous! The NOS!
And we're not about huffing it and getting the giggles!
We're about cranking out horsepower with nitrous oxide!
(techno synth sounds)
We've talked about engines before.
To get more power, you need more boom.
And to get more boom, you need more oxygen,
to burn more gas more quickly.
Gasoline needs oxygen to burn,
just like every other flammable thing.
And the more oxygen you add to something,
the more of it you can burn.
A cylinder is only so big, which means
it can only fit so much air.
And one way to get more air in,
is to force it in with forced induction.
(cheering)
And that's where turbo chargers
and super chargers come into play.
They way we're talking about today,
is sneaking it in (booing)
with nitrous oxide.
Nitrous oxide gas was discovered in 1772
by Joseph Priestley.
This guy was all about isolating gases,
because that made you pretty cool in the late 1700s.
- I tell the best stories!
- He tried to find a use for nitrous as a preservative.
But it didn't work, and all it really did
was make people giggle.
So that's what people used it for,
through most of the 1800s.
It was a party trick and an anesthetic.
Nobody figured out how to do anything else with it
until World War II, when the Germans
started using it in plane engines
for better high altitude performance.
But turbo chargers became more advanced and reliable,
so its use didn't last long.
You've probably heard folks refer to nitrous oxide
as NOS.
- NOS!
- NOS is actually an acronym for
nitrous oxide systems.
It's a name brand, just like some people
call tissues Kleenex, or the way Nolan
calls his inline skates Rollerblades.
Nitrous oxide is a way to get more oxygen into the engine.
But if oxygen is what we want,
why not just shoot more oxygen in there?
Like from an oxygen tank?
Well, pioneering drag racer Barney Navarro
tried that out in the 50s.
And, well, it didn't work
as well as he'd hoped!
He found that a straight shot of oxygen
lets the fuel explode at pretty much
any place that's hot enough inside the engine.
That's right, it's the dreaded
pinging - [Offscreen Man] You suck!
- Pre-ignition.
And what Navarro got was detonation.
He really messed up his engine,
and just decided it wasn't worth it.
(sobbing)
The benefit of nitrous oxide
is that it doesn't release the oxygen
until it's already mixed with the gas,
in the cylinder, and ready to blow.
The nitrous is in a canister.
When it gets shot out, it expands.
(nitrous hissing)
An added benefit is that when liquids
expand into gas, they cool off,
and cooler air is denser air, remember?
It's not until the nitrous oxide gets into the cylinder
that it releases the oxygen.
In a hot engine, the normally stable molecules
of nitrogen and oxygen split, releasing O2.
Now, with extra oxygen in the cylinder,
all you gotta do is add the right amount
of fuel, and boom!
(explosion booms)
More power.
And the dreaded pre-ignition, well,
both the splitting of the NOS,
and the release of those freed up nitrogen atoms,
help to prevent pinging. - [Offscreen Man] You suck!
- It's kismet!
- Jak sie masz!
- One nitrous shot is able to bump output
from 50 to 300 horsepower.
It really is the best bang for your buck,
in terms of buying speed for your car.
There's two overall methods of nitrous delivery,
known as dry injection and wet injection.
In dry injection, the liquid nitrous oxide
is squirted into the air intake by itself,
and the fuel system is rigged to add
more gasoline to the cylinders.
In wet injection, nitrous oxide and gasoline
are injected into the air intake together,
and that requires different mods to your fuel system.
Because it won't release oxygen before
it gets to the heat of the cylinder,
NOS can be injected as the air enters the engine,
or right at the cylinder with the fuel!
Some systems are tooled by hand,
like an old-school carburetor.
And other systems are computer automated,
to get the right mix of gas to O2,
with millisecond precision,
sometimes at the point of injection.
When you want that neck-snapping
(crunching)
horsepower, you activate the system
by just pushing a button that's installed
in the cockpit.
The delivery systems are designed to mix
the right amount of fuel
as the pressurized nitrous pours into the engine.
If nitrous sits in the line,
it's at a different density than
if it's under pressure.
Because the amount of gas to inject with the nitrous
is based on liquid nitrous oxide,
a valve releases any air and nitrous oxide gas
that might be trapped in the lines.
Without a purge, the car would
bog down for an instant, until the liquid nitrous oxide
reaches the intake.
It would run rich, and not fire right.
When the purge system is activated,
one or more plumes of nitrous oxide
will flash from liquid into vapor as they're released.
This brings liquid nitrous oxide
all the way up from the storage tank
to the valve that will release it in the engine.
(valves hissing)
It's pretty cool.
So if nitrous oxide's so great at making all this power,
why don't we just inject it all the time
and drive everywhere, like we're Jesse
from Fast and the Furious?
(upbeat music)
For one, it makes an engine work way harder,
and car manufacturers don't necessarily
engineer their engines to take all that stress.
(yelling)
It's just bad news.
And storage and cost can be a pain, too.
For example, running a 125 horsepower shot
from a 10 lb bottle of nitrous
would probably get you about
10 quarter-mile drag races.
That's 10 lbs of NOS every two and a half miles.
At about $5 a pound, you're gonna find out
your car's stock horsepower is perfectly adequate.
And hopefully, you'll stop complaining
about these gas prices.
Nolan.
Since continuous use would get crazy expensive,
and put added strain on the engine components,
nitrogen's just used in short bursts.
And that's why it's popular in drag racing,
and not in other types of racing.
Then,
(dramatic music)
right at the beginning of the 21st century,
a little movie called The Fast and the Furious came along.
And a couple of guys racing nitrous-equipped,
foreign four cylinder cars changed everything.
All right, this is not everything.
But it sparked
(applause)
an interest in the compact racing community.
And now, you're just as likely to see
nitrous oxide injection on an imported four cylinder
as you are in a domestic V8.
So even though we're not sucking it down
and breathing it in, shoot it into an engine
and it'll still make you giggly.
(giggling)
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but turboed, supercharged with NOS.
- NOS!
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To learn about gas and how it mixes with O2,
check out this gasoline video.
And check out this wheelhouse Nolan did
on the rivalry between Dodge and Ford.