Introduction of pure Oxygen into a N/A engine.

picassoonwheels

picassoonwheels

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Seeking advice on something I was pondering over.

The petrol in th engine requires oxygen to burn, and th air around us is contains only a fifth of oxygen, and the other gases do not assisst in the actuall combustion, at least at the given temperatures.

Thus the combustion would, in theory be restricted to the level it is, but the amount of oxygen available to it.

My question to you is, hypothetically, if the availability of oxygen is increased at the air intake, would it not prevent the induction of the other gases into the combustion chamber, thus effectively providing a more efficient mixture for ignition and the resulting ignition produce more power?

The oxygen can be introduced by the means of a spray jet at the point just before or after the butterfly valve, and since it would be expanding after release from the compressed state it was in the cylinder it is stored in would also absorb heat from the surrounding air, and provide a cooler mixture of the other gases to be mixed with the fuel, and facilitate greater volumes of mixture induction into the combustion chamber.


Do you think this would work, to any justifiable degree? And in case you think this 'hair brained' idea may work after some modifications, what modifications would you suggest.

I thought of this since I have easy and cheap access to bottled oxygen. and then in my opinion, i would need to mod the other parts of the car as I would need to do for any other form of assisted aspiration.

Food for thought?..............
 
Re: Introduction of 0xygen in a na engine.

A pure oxygen intake would no doubt literally explode. There are issues with pre ignition also if you are upping the oxygen levels.

Essentially when you are adding Nitrous injection you are doing precisely this (adding more oxygen to the burn).
 
Re: Introduction of 0xygen in a na engine.

There are also the inherent dangers of driving around with a highly explosive canister in the car.
 
isn't that essentially what N2O does, increase the volume of oxygen going into the combustion chamber so you can increase the amount of fuel to get more power?

it sounds like the same principle to me.
 
Not my own work, lifted from the Wizard of Nos site:

The simple and most relevant answer is because we couldn’t get enough into the engine for it to be as effective as nitrous oxide. Air has only 23.6% oxygen by weight, the rest is made up largely of nitrogen. Although nitrogen does not aid the actual combustion process it does absorb heat, as well as damping what would otherwise be a violent explosion, rather than a controlled burn. When you add nitrous, it has 36% oxygen with the rest being nitrogen. So the more nitrous oxide you add, the less percentage of nitrogen is available to absorb heat. That’s one of the reasons why adding more nitrous increases the heat of combustion very rapidly. If we were to add pure oxygen (which has been tried), the percentage of nitrogen would progressively decline to a much greater degree than with nitrous, as more and more oxygen was added. Consequently an engine wouldn’t be able to handle much pure oxygen before the increase in heat lowered the detonation level to unusable levels. Furthermore, oxygen can only be ‘readily’ stored in a compressed ‘gaseous’ form, without being stored in a special cryogenic thermos cylinder (a cylinder within a cylinder with a vacuum between the two walls) and as a gas it loses the cooling effect that nitrous offers by being available as a liquid. Adding the oxidiser as gaseous oxygen would displace more air than adding nitrous in liquid form, resulting in a lower total power capability. In other words; by using nitrous oxide we can squeeze in more oxygen atoms in a more beneficial form, containing substantial amounts of detonation suppressing nitrogen, than would be the case with gaseous oxygen.
 
waynne said:
Whack a compressed cylinder of anything hard and then tell me it's not explosive! The gases they contain are not what I was thinking about here.
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Fair comment, but the same can be said for a NOS bottle or a fire extinguisher.

However, when tested to destruction, they split rather than explode.

You have to bear in mind that you are dealing with one of the house pedants here - the other being HD :)
 
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One has to drop vague misinterpretable, ill informed and badly researched comments in to keep our resident pedants happy!
 
waynne said:
One has to drop vague misinterpretable, ill informed and badly researched comments in to keep our resident pedants happy!
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Ah, but pedants are never happy, as there are so many mistakes but too few of us to fix them all :)
 
SUSH Children!

Or its detention for the lot of you!.

;) ;) ;)

OK so though your input has made a few things clear to me, old-git, but, to the best of my knowledge, Oxygen is not combustible, it aides combustion, as a catalyst. Thus, would not the explosion or combustion depend upon the amount of fuel available?

And the double skin on the cylinder with vacuum is actually the same as a thermos and acts as insulation to prevent the temperature rising to levels where it would strain against the release valve, right?........

Any crack in the cylinder would result in an explosion since N2O is stable, and if at all an explosion occurs, it is due to availability of fuel at combustible temperatures

And oxygen, in a compressed state is also liquid, though, agreed that the pressure has to be much higher.

So now, in my opinion, introducing pure oxygen is dangerous, but couldn't it be possible to manage the combustion just by increasing the oxygen percentage in the air intake, along with all the other gases,to produce the same effect?

As in, have a jet just inside of the butterfly, while also allowing normal air to come in at the same time, and introducing the oxygen in controlled limits?..........


Please correct me if I am wrong............
 
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I don't think there would be an 'explosion' if the tank was ruptured as they are designed not to explode. The gas would simply rush out of the opening. Any overpressure in a an unruptured tank would be dealt with by the pressure release valve.

As to whether oxygen would work, I guess it could be made to work, but not as well as or as easily as NOS, otherwise we would all be using it instead :)

As an aside, I don't think N2O bottles are double skinned.
 
How Stuff Works:

So why don't cars carry around pure oxygen? The problem is that oxygen is pretty bulky, even when you compress it, and an engine uses a LOT of oxygen. A gallon of gasoline weighs 6.2 pounds, so the engine needs 86.8 pounds of oxygen (6.2 x 14) per gallon of gasoline. Oxygen is a gas, so it is extremely light. One pound of oxygen fills 11.2 cubic feet of space, so a gallon of gasoline needs 972.16 cubic feet of oxygen to go with it. If your gas tank holds 20 gallons of gasoline, you would have to carry almost 20,000 cubic feet of oxygen with it! This is a lot of oxygen - so much that it would fill a 2,500 square foot house.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/oxygen-engine.htm
 
No you wouldn't because the oxygen in the cylinder is compressed far above atmospheric pressure.

As for compressed gases LPG and CNG cars all have pressurised tanks. There are no known safety issues with tanks designed for the purpose.

If anything common rail diesel cars represent more of a danger. The fuel rail pressure in some cases is over 2000 times atmospheric pressure.
 
xacro said:
How Stuff Works:

A gallon of gasoline weighs 6.2 pounds, so the engine needs 86.8 pounds of oxygen (6.2 x 14) per gallon of gasoline.
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Not quite right. The stoichiometric air–fuel mixture is approximately 14.7, not 14. This is 1 molecule of fuel for every 14.7 molecules of air. As air is approx 21% oxygen the engine only requires 3.1 molecules of oxygen so the oxygen:fuel ratio is 3.1:1 not 14.7:1

I have no idea what the relative molecular weights of gasoline and oxygen are but I am going to assume that they are the same for this discussion - if anyone knows what they are they can adjust my figures :). This would mean that you would only need 19.22lbs of oxygen per gallon of fuel. Using 15lb nitrous bottles as these are easily available, a 9 gallon fuel tank will require just under 12 bottles, not impossible to do but somewhat heavy and bulky.

Does this look right?

The overriding question is, however, with free oxygen floating around, why would you bother? :)
 
The molecular weight of oxygen is 32 and nitrous oxide is 44 (both rounded up )
gasoline is much higher 100+

:toung::toung::toung:

This is of course of no practicle use but as the thread was getting anal I thought it was only right I helped it on its way
 
Also, with no nitrogen to compress and expand to help push pistons down, power could be compromised.
 
Yes. We'd need to raise to compression ratio massively to achieve the same brake mean cylinder pressure. And reduce the swept volume. So a 500cc engine would perform like a 2500cc engine.
 
old-git said:
But not for very long :)
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Probably correct unless the whole bottom end was built to the same levels of durability as a much larger engine.

The short stroke and small bore would reap benefits in terms of reciprocating masses though and might offset the wear rate very significantly.

However, OG, you and I probably concur that it's not a practical way to run a vehicle.
 
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