- If "Fast and Furious" taught us anything, is that when you push that little red button on your steering wheel, your car goes into warp speed, like a fricking speed racer on Naboo. That magic button releases a squirt of nitrous oxide, and instantly allows your car's engine to produce 50, 100, 300 more horsepower. That's pretty incredible, but this Mr Hollywood "Fast and Furious" way of using Nos is pretty antiquated.

So I wanted to find out in 2020, how is it really being used? Today we're gonna break down the chemistry of this laughing gas, look at how "Fast and Furious" used it in the movies and see how Stephan Papadakis, the king of Nos himself, uses this mystery gas. (upbeat music) - Thanks to Keeps for sponsoring another episode of bumper to bumper.

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- So there's no need to go into how a combustion engine works. We've done that a lot here on the channel, but as long as you can remember this you're golden. Okay?

An engine makes more power by combining air and fuel, and then igniting that air fuel mixture. You've got more air plus more fuel equals more power. And one way to make more power is by forcing more air into the cylinders.

That's called force induction and to do this we use superchargers and we use turbochargers. Now the air you're breathing in right now, the same air that your car's engine is sucking in through the intake contains 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. And oxygen is the important element we're after.

So 78% of the volume that's getting squished into the cylinders is pretty useless in the combustion process. That nitrogen, it's taken up a lot of usable space that oxygen could be having. Now you might be thinking and I thought this myself, why not just take pure oxygen and somehow sneak that into the cylinders?

Well, there are a couple of reasons why, but the main reason is that pure oxygen will cause uncontrolled burns, it's volatile. So when you supply a dense concentration of oxygen, it makes a fuel mixture extremely reactive. So reactive that hotspots in the cylinder, heck, even in the intake itself can cause many combustions and that's not good.

You want those combustions to be controlled so that they add to making more useful power. A second problem is you'd also need a ton of oxygen to carry around with you to feed your engine. Say your fuel ratio is 14.

7 to one, meaning that for every gram of gas burned, you need 14. 7 grams of oxygen. You can do the math and it turns out you'd need over 200 scuba bottles of oxygen to carry around.

Now, things would get a little easier if say we could use liquid oxygen, we could store a lot more oxygen in liquid form and therefore not need as many bottles. Well, we'd run into another problem and that's oxygen can't be liquified above a temperature of minus 119 degrees Celsius. So the equipment needed and the high cost to make it makes this not a feasible option, but what if there was a substance out there that could be liquified fairly easy, that has an oxygen component to it and doesn't need a ton of complex equipment to use in our engine?

Well, welcome to the party Mr laughing gas, nitrous oxide just fricking walked in the door. Now a common misconception is that nitrous oxide is a fuel. It is not, it is an oxidizer.

Nitrous oxides consist of an oxygen added bonded to two nitrogen atoms. And at most temperatures and pressures it's considered an inert gas, meaning it doesn't undergo any chemical reactions, but if you put it in a high heat, high pressure situation, the bonds holding the nitrogen and oxygen break apart. So at about 300 degrees Celsius it gets split into three oxygen and nitrogen molecules.

Now let's say this split happens inside the combustion chamber. We now have a sudden increase in oxygen that can aid in the combustion process. We get to now dumping more fuel to maintain our proper air fuel ratio.

And it's the additional fuel being burnt during the combustion cycle that allows the engine to produce, hit it, hit it James. - Power baby! - Now there's also a second benefit when you use nitrous.

When it's released from the bottle, it's going from a state of high pressure to low pressure and it vaporizes and when that happens, it gets cold. It's so cold that it also cools the surrounding intake air and when you lower the intake air temperature, you increase the air's density providing even more oxygen into the cylinder. So that's all theory and all, but what about the practical application?

What's the hardware required to make this stuff useful? There are two types of nitrous oxide system designs, there's wet and there's dry. A dry system only injects nitrous oxide gas and relies on the car standard fuel system to deliver more fuel.

A wet system adds both nitrous and fuel. So let's see how Brian's dry set up works. On the rear of the car is a bottle that stores the nitrous and coming off that bottle is a bit of plumbing that routes to the engine bay where it meets up with a solenoid.

A solenoid is just an electronically controlled valve. Open, close, open, close, that's all it does. Running from that solenoid is some more plumbing that leads to the intake track upstream from the throttle body, where it meets a fogger and a fogger is just a nozzle.

It's a fitting with a hole in it that allows the nitrous oxide to flow through it. When a switch that's connected to that solenoid is activated, that's our magic button on the steering wheel there, the solenoid opens and the nitrous oxide flows into the intake flowing pass the throttle body into the cylinders. So that's what we see in the movie, but we already know that we have to add more fuel into the mix, that's how we're gonna get our power.

So how did they do this in the age of simple fuel injection systems? Well, it's actually quite clever. Coming off your nitrous solenoid is another line that goes to the top of the fuel pressure regulator.

So by bleeding off a small amount of nitrous pressure from the solenoid, it creates a pressure increase that feeds the factory fuel pressure regulator. Imagine your fuel injector is working around 50 PSI then you turn on the nitrous, a little nitrous goes with the fuel pressure regulator and makes it go higher, say at around 100 PSI fuel pressure through our injectors. The more pressure pushes more fueling.

And this method only works on fuel injected cars. For carborated systems, there's no way to get extra fuel into the motor. You could rig up a Smokey Yunick system like they did back in the day by jetting your carbs super rich, or you could get with the times, grandpa, and use what's called a wet system.

(slurping) Ah. Now there are a few variations of the wet system, but for now we're gonna talk about the single wet fogger. Now it's called a wet system because the nitrous and fuel are mixed together.

The fuel makes it wet. The nitrous side of things are the same as before, but there's also an additional set of fuel solenoids. Now coming off your fuel line is a fuel solenoid that when activated sends additional fuel into a fogger that mixes with the nitrous and this fuel solenoid gets activated at the same time as the nitrous solenoid.

Now what's controlling the amount of fuel as well as the amount of nitrous is the size of the jet. Now you may hear the term 50 shot, 100 shot, 300 shot, that refers to the amount of horsepower gained when using this type of setup. And the piece that dictates what horsepower figure you get are the fuel and nitrous jets.

Now jet is just a piece with an orifice that is precisely measured in the thousandths of an inch. The bigger the number, the bigger the orifice and the more fuel and nitrous that can be squirted through it. And then that makes more power.

That's the only thing is controlling more power, which is bigger holes. Now with either method, the way I just described is a system that rests on hitting a button, but in today's age, we have computers that are much better at determining when this system should be activated. So I wanted to see how current day racers are using it.

So I got to chat with Mr Stephan Papadakis himself on how he uses nitrous. Now one of the current ways of using nitrous oxide in small horsepower applications is to let your electronic fuel injection system do the work. But this is having a lot of faith in your car's stock ECU and fuel management system, and if you're running a dry setup, you're risking a lot.

If for whatever reason, your car stock fuel system can't match the requirements needed with the added increase in oxygen, your air fuel mixture will run lean and then you're kind of screwed. So you can get around this by using a wet fogger, which we talked about before, or by using a more advanced wet system with some aftermarket hardware and tuning. Papadakis uses what's called a direct port setup.

This is where you have one nozzle per intake runner which provides each cylinder with its own supply. So if you have a six cylinder engine, you have six foggers that supply each cylinder individually. Now this can be in the wet variety where fuel and nitrous oxide are mixed, or it can be dry where you use your existing fuel system and that's how Papadakis uses it.

So when you arm the nitrous oxide, his aftermarket ECU knows that the system is on and so instead of opening the fuel injector only X amount, it opens the injector X plus a little bit extra because we now have more oxygen thanks to the nitrous. And because the injector is open for a longer time, we get more fuel. Now with this method, you can do a lot of fine tuning with your fuel delivery.

Inside the ECU, they have a bunch of parameters set. Once the switch is flipped on in the cabin, the ECU knows that nitrous oxide is available. It then has a list of commands that follow.

For example, the solenoids aren't active until your engine reaches 3000 RPM. And let's say your red line is 8,000 RPM so to be safe, it'll only dump nitrous up until 7,500 RPM. And this is just one example, but you can tune and create any type of profile you want, depending on your application.

The system will also retard the ignition time you can say by a few degrees. By retarding the timing, the plug fires later in the compression stroke, when the piston is closer to top dead center. That helps to reduce detonation before you want it to actually happen.

Now, let's say an example, when you're running a turbo, we can have the nitrous turn on when there's some turbo lag. So say you're under 20 pounds of boost, the system turns on. Then once the boost builds up and you're back over 20 pounds, it turns back off.

So you only using nitrous in that small window when your turbo is building up pressure to boost. And one of the great things about nitrous oxide is that you have a separate tune on the car when the system is armed. So the EC knows that you have the ability to use nitrous.

So when you don't have it, it switches back to its normal stock state and your business as usual. A little sneaky, that's why they call it sneaky gas. (beep) (dramatic music) - Listen up, class!

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This is really exciting. I love you guys. (soft violin music) (beep) - Our nitrous has come a long way since the 50s.

I'm thinking of actually running some nitrous in my Catfish. What do you guys think? Do you guys run nitrous?

Let me know in the comments. How much nitrous do you use? What's the most you use?

Thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you for Stephan Papadakis for helping us out with this episode. Guy's a fricking brainiac, he' a big wiz, go check out his channel.

Why You're Wrong About NOS