Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: where smart happens Him Marshall Brain with today's question, how
Speaker 1: does nitrous oxide help an engine perform better? It turns
Speaker 1: out that nitrous oxide is a great source of oxygen.
Speaker 1: When you heat nitrous oxide to about five seventy degrees fahrenheit,
Speaker 1: it splits into oxygen and nitrogen. So the injection of
Speaker 1: nitrous oxide into an engine means that more oxygen is
Speaker 1: available during combustion. Because you have more oxygen, you can
Speaker 1: also inject more fuel, allowing the same engine to produce
Speaker 1: more power. Nitrous Oxide is one of the simplest ways
Speaker 1: to provide a significant horsepower boost to any gasoline engine.
Speaker 1: Nitrous oxide has another effect that improves performance even more.
Speaker 1: When it vaporizes, nitrous oxide provides a significant cooling effect
Speaker 1: on the intake air. When you reduce the intake air temperature,
Speaker 1: you increase the air's density, and this provides even more
Speaker 1: oxygen inside the cylinder. The only problem with nitrous oxide
Speaker 1: is that it's fairly bulky and the engine needs a
Speaker 1: lot of it. Like any gas, it takes up a
Speaker 1: fair amount of space even when compressed into a liquid.
Speaker 1: A five liter engine running at four thousand rotations per
Speaker 1: minute consumes about ten thousand liters of air every minute,
Speaker 1: compared to about point two liters of gasoline, so it
Speaker 1: would take a tremendous amount of nitrous oxide to run
Speaker 1: a car continuously. Therefore, a car normally carries only a
Speaker 1: few minutes of nitrous oxide, and the driver uses it
Speaker 1: very selectively by pushing a button. Be sure to check
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