If you desire to make a high - power4 - solidus engine , there are a couple of different ways to accomplish your goal . One agency is to increase the deracination . Another is to stuff more melodic line into the railway locomotive with aturbochargeror a supercharger . If you want to go to extremes , you would replacegasolinealtogether and use a more gumptious fuel . Top fuel dragsters do all three .
A " nitro - combust " railway locomotive and a " top fuel " locomotive are the same thing – engines designed to burnnitromethanerather than gasolene . Gasoline is a hydrocarbon , and the common chemic pattern for gasoline is C8H18 . Nitromethane has the normal CH3NO2 . Nitromethane is a little like petrol that has been pre - assorted withnitrous oxide . The fuel come with its own oxygen atoms to aid it burn up .
The big advantage of nitromethane is that you’re able to get a lot more power from each detonation inside the engine . pounding for punt , nitromethane is less industrious than petrol , but you could burn a lot more nitromethane in a piston chamber . The net result is more power per stroke . You typically need about 15 pounds of air to burn 1 dog pound of petrol , whereas you need only 1.7 pounds of air to burn 1 pound of nitromethane . This means that , compared to gas , you could pump about 8 clip more nitromethane into a cylinder of a return volume and still get complete burning .
Since nitromethane is not as dense as gasolene in terms of energy , you do not get an 8 - clip improvement in full term of index . It is more like a 2.5 - time melioration ( seethis pagefor a compare ) . Still , you may replicate or triple your locomotive ’s H.P. just by changing the fuel . That ’s a huge improvement !
A typical drag - racing locomotive engine has a displacement of 8.9 liters , issuperchargedand create about 6,000horsepower . It can sunburn close to a congius ( 4 liters ) of nitromethane per second ! To put that in perspective , there is something like 2 teaspoons ( 10 cc ) of nitromethane being poured into each piston chamber per intake stroke .
An interesting thing about nitromethane is that it does not burn as quickly as gas . In fact , there is not enough time to burn all of the nitromethane between when the light plug fires and when the exhaust fumes valve opens . So the railway locomotive is pumping still - burning nitromethane into the exhaust pipe . That ’s why you see flames shooting out of the exhaust system of a pull - racing motorcar .
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