How does nitrous oxide help an engine perform better?

Nitrous oxide boosts engine power in two significant ways. Find out exactly how nitrous works its magic in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com,
where smart happens Him Marshall Brain with today's question, how
does nitrous oxide help an engine perform better? It turns
out that nitrous oxide is a great source of oxygen.

(00:23):
When you heat nitrous oxide to about five seventy degrees fahrenheit,
it splits into oxygen and nitrogen. So the injection of
nitrous oxide into an engine means that more oxygen is
available during combustion. Because you have more oxygen, you can
also inject more fuel, allowing the same engine to produce
more power. Nitrous Oxide is one of the simplest ways

(00:46):
to provide a significant horsepower boost to any gasoline engine.
Nitrous oxide has another effect that improves performance even more.
When it vaporizes, nitrous oxide provides a significant cooling effect
on the intake air. When you reduce the intake air temperature,
you increase the air's density, and this provides even more

(01:07):
oxygen inside the cylinder. The only problem with nitrous oxide
is that it's fairly bulky and the engine needs a
lot of it. Like any gas, it takes up a
fair amount of space even when compressed into a liquid.
A five liter engine running at four thousand rotations per
minute consumes about ten thousand liters of air every minute,

(01:29):
compared to about point two liters of gasoline, so it
would take a tremendous amount of nitrous oxide to run
a car continuously. Therefore, a car normally carries only a
few minutes of nitrous oxide, and the driver uses it
very selectively by pushing a button. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join

(01:52):
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