John LardasTech. Drawing 1 Design Project

Mr. Hines 12/6/2016

Today’s AgendaI 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.

• 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…

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 …

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,

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…

Detonation/engine knockThe 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.”

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…

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…

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…

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.

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

1.68 in.TOP PART INCLUDES

ARMING SWITCHMOUNTS 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.

• 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.

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

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.

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.

Q & A

sources• Formula1.net

• Summit racing equipment

• Precisionrings.com