Fuel additives

[oldman]

Gasoline is a hydrocarbon, and the common chemical formula for gasoline is C8H18. Nitromethane has the formula CH3NO2. Nitromethane is a little like gasoline that has been pre-mixed with nitrous oxide. The fuel comes with its own oxygen atoms to help it burn.

The big advantage of nitromethane is that you can get a lot more power from each explosion inside the engine. Pound for pound, nitromethane is less energetic than gasoline, but you can burn a lot more nitromethane in a cylinder. The net result is more power per stroke. You typically need about 15 pounds of air to burn 1 pound of gasoline, whereas you need only 1.7 pounds of air to burn 1 pound of nitromethane. This means that, compared to gasoline, you can pump about 8 times more nitromethane into a cylinder of a given volume and still get complete combustion. Therefore the need for massive injector mods, (8 times the fuel) which my Z1000 is not capable of doing. That is also why it would not work in a lawnmower.

Typically nitromethane is mixed with 10% methanol, which helps keep the engine in one piece.

Jim Beam is brown.

[Gosling1]

nicely put mate.

the other thing to consider with nitro, is that the amount you can pump into a cylinder is limited by the amount of air that the cylinder can pump in the first place. An internal combustion motor is just a big air-pump when all is said and done.

Nitro only has about 1/4 the energy density of normal fuel so you need 4 times the amount of nitro in the first place just to get an equal *bang*, the fact that you can pump 8 times more nitro into a cylinder gives you about double the *bang* factor all else being equal....

[Mattjin]

If you want to see if it will mix with the petrol you are using, simply mix a small amount in a jar and leave it overnight to see if it separates. If it doesn't... go play!!

I can remember running up to 65% nitro in some of my RC boats many many years ago. It ran 5% methanol to help keep the oil in solution, a few percent of propylene oxide to get it all fired up a bit easier (we now know it is a dangerous carcinogen), and the rest was oil to keep it all together at near to 50,000rpm!