1. John Lardas
Tech. Drawing 1 Design Project
Mr. Hines 12/6/2016

2. Today’s Agenda
I like chemistry and engines and how they relate but I don’t know as
much as I want to know yet about a lot of the stuff so if you can, you
should jump in and correct me real quickly
I designed a kit that compliments a nitrous fuel
injection kit someone might buy like the one shown
left, or a custom setup someone’s working on.
People will hunt for and buy a lot of this stuff
separately when they buy a kit like this NOS kit …
stronger crankshafts/pistons/piston rings and
mounts for the arming switch/activation buttons so
they can put them in the best spot, etc.

3. • I like nitrous and fuel injection but I can’t learn more about it and goof
around with systems as much as I want to: I can’t afford to mess up an
engine: I still use my dad’s car…
• So we’re left with reading, designing parts in CAD, making models, etc.
I got to learn a ton about heat expansion, chemistry, thermodynamics,
solving design puzzles, drafting isoviews, practice thinking about how I
could solve a problem whenever I see one, etc. lots of stuff.
• I was thinking and reading about nitrous fuel injectors ad exactly how
I’d want my setup to be and how safe and convenient and great I could
try and make it.
First
though…

4. England, 1793- Scientist and Clergyman Joseph Priestly discovers
Nitrous Oxide. We experiment with it in the Medical and dentistry
fields for years before we use it in rocketry, motor racing, etc..
a Quick history/background on Nitrous fuel injection…
One of these bad boys could almost work if you
could just fit one into your car: pure compressed
oxygen gas. These are never boosting your power as
much as this little guy though.
Fast forward a bit and we start using N2o in other vehicles like our racecars. We didn’t start with Nitrous oxide: there was a
trial and error process… There are a lot of different compounds that could help us burn more fuel faster than plain old
atmospheric air (air is ONLY 21% OXYGEN…) but Nitrous oxide is by far the safest and most powerful.
Nitrous oxide fuel injection shows up first in jet engines
during World War II. Maybe it applied most
practically/obviously to external combustion engines like
this one to the right …

5. There’s more too…
There’s a practical competitor called Nitromethane used in motorsport all the
time, you’ve heard of it as ‘nitro’ or a ‘nitro boost’
Hydrogen peroxide has been used in submarines and rockets but it’s a much
weaker oxidizer than nitrous,
Liquid Oxygen is a more powerful oxidizer than even N2o and could maybe make a car engine a monster… but it will
slowly eat through engine parts and most containers you put it in. They use it in rockets, Maybe someday they’ll use it
in supercars. It’d need a very intensive/water jacket cooling system in the trunk. A cool idea for my next
project…doesn’t matter for now…
Chlorine and Fluorine are strong oxidizers, someone somewhere probably had to die to help us find out that they
aren’t safe/practical for this, …
But the overall most powerful and cost efficient: Nitrous oxide, made for fuel
injection. It becomes a liquid when it’s compressed, so it’s easy to distribute in
exactly the amount you want through the nozzles. It’s a very neutral, unreactive gas
until it’s heated, it’s non-toxic, and it is not flammable until heated to 570+ degree
temperatures.
Anyway,

6. Well when N2o leaves the bottle it heats up/becomes a gas/breaks down/meets
up with the rest of its air-fuel mixture and vaporizes, adding a cooling effect to
the intake charge.
Our air’s colder now, and thus more dense. There’s more room in each of our
cylinders this cycle, more air-fuel mixture jammed into each cylinder, higher
volumetric efficiency.
Very cool cooling effect that nitrous has on top of it’s already significant effect:
giving us more oxygen to combust fuel with than basic old atmospheric air. (N20 is
~12% more oxygen-dense than the air outside.)
Huge, exciting, 2-part increase to our output, just takes stronger parts to handle
the jump in cylinder pressure or you’ll crack/warp pistons, break crankshafts, warp
your piston rings so much that they allow too much /not enough blowby, etc.
The way that nitrous oxide compresses to a liquid instead of a gas puts it in a different
playing field than any other oxidizer we could try in our engines, it’s really cool… we
always think of nitrogen as cooling or cold right…

7. Detonation/engine knock
The wrong air to fuel ratio will cause detonation to occur in an engine. These aren’t
explosions in the sense that we think of: gas detonates at a much lower velocity
than do solid and liquid explosives like TNT. Scientists study these smaller
combustion processes, watching in slow motion to learn more about exothermic
heat release and subsonic waves.
They’re very small supersonic combustions that go on in your engine before they’re
supposed to. They release more heat and pressure than we’re built to handle, and
they release it in the wrong places, causing warping and cracking of parts over time.
Over time as in a few seconds of allowed detonation can cause huge damage.
My custom forged pistons and piston rings can withstand these detonations, and
the NITROAID I’m working on centralizes all of your controls in your center console
and gives you a platform on which to wire a sensor system.
From a Formula One website article that I think must have been written by Legendary retired F1 racer
Mario Andretti shown right –
“It is not the use of nitrous oxide that causes engine damage. It is
the misuse of nitrous oxide by the tuner and driver.”

8. And a fun fact, if for some reason you had Nitrous oxide but not
enough oxygen, you can extract the breathable air from N20
through a simple decomposition reaction. An astronauts rocket
propellant doubles as his emergency back-up breathing air…

9. X2
I was inspired by some of
these good designs from
companies like Summit
racing… I wanted to come
up with my own geometry
for custom piston rings
that handled heat
expansion well. I did some
reading and started
goofing around, trying to
make friends with the
lines and figure this thing
out…

10. X4
My design is a lot like the one I was inspired by,
used by Precision Rings Inc. It plans for the
amount of heat expansion it’s built to endure,
locking in place after expanding but with more
wiggle room than these: I’ll show you in my
sketches. They always allow the right amount of
blowby, too, because of these curves. Their
design tolerates exactly the amount of expansion
the ring is built to tolerate and then needs
replacement. It’s better than it sounds though: it
only expands so much: it’s made of forged
aluminum, and it divides this expansion between
two points. They use a silicon coating that halts
expansion too. I’m just working to try improve
these known geometries, still needs testing…

11. Needs improvement…but a good starting point?:
Improving the geometry and making a great
custom forged piston ring line.
• I had the idea while I was sketching maybe you
guys can help make sure I’m not missing
anything/help to improve it
• As this ring gap closes you still allow some
blowby with my curvature I have going here.
We’ll absorb the inevitable ring expansion and
allow a healthy amount of blowby: no build-up.

12. 5/64
4.030 BORE
5/64
3/16 Still working on the size I’ll use
to fit the right
engines/sometimes
companies use a good
universal size for their
production line like this one:
2 5/64ths-inch compression
rings and a 3/16th inch oil ring.
4.030 inch piston

13. 1.68 in.
TOP PART INCLUDES
ARMING SWITCH
MOUNTS AND LIGHTS
UNIT IS 4.50
INCH
TALL INSERT
6.55 in.
1.31 in.
4.00 in.
2.50 in.2.42 in.
4.92 in.
NITROAID? Just
a name I started
thinking of for
the system, I’ll
have to keep
working on it.

14. • The other part I started working on… It’s a center
console insert that I thought of when I was looking at
my center console and this little change holder I have.
• It’s got mounts for some of the common arming
switches/shapes, and a to be continued set of
programmable lights. Still needs a lot of work but a
lot of systems have a lot of this stuff, just a new idea
for a part that centralizes all of it to add safety and
convenience…
• Lights that are green when your timings
retarded the right amount, when your
bottle still has n2o in it, etc. could all be
in this hub, in the same place where you
make sure you’re switched
off/disconnected when you’re on the
road.

15. Slide in/out mounts of
different sizes for wot
switches, the switches that
arm or de-arm the system

17. How I’ll continue
• Need model to mess around with
• Need lab to apply ~600 degree heat and see how much warping goes
on in x amount of time before I can keep working on this design
• Need model of center console unit…ran out of time/focused more on
piston ring
• The pistons need slots those are just pictures of pistons…They’ll have
2-4 slots/divets for these ring caps, I don’t know if the design works
just for any piston of the right size. Have more testing to do need
models… adding the right size wrist pins to the set, too… Thanks for
listening/watching.

18. Lessons Learned
• I think nitrous fuel injection is really cool. I had a lot of fun and I
have enough work for 2 more projects.
Interesting road facts if we have time/you want to hear…
• You can get a an expensive ticket in England idling your engine for too
long.

19. Q & A

20. sources
• Formula1.net
• Summit racing equipment
• Precisionrings.com