 Car engines burn oxygen and fuel to produce power, the more burned the more power produced. Many performance car makers have acknowledged the fact that the amount of air that can be sucked into a cylinder is the limiting factor in power production. Things like turbochargers or superchargers help by increasing the air pressure on the way in, but the real limitation is in the low percentage of oxygen in the air we breath.
Nitrous Oxide is simply a replacement for air in the fuel and oxygen mixture the engine burns. Having close to four times the oxygen of air by percentage and being stored in a tank at 800 PSI, nitrous oxide all but eliminates the limitations of how much fuel mixture can be burned, but there are down sides. The most common reaction I get to using nitrous oxide is "you're going to blow up your car". Everybody has heard of some kid who blew a motor using nitrous - I'm not that kid. The second most common reaction is "so you push the button and...". Nope. Medusa (the name for my nitrous oxide induction system) goes way beyond any on/off system.
My race car is a 1991 Honda CRX turbo + nitrous. The turbo does most work supplying a pressurized intake charge to the engine for power production. There are two weaknesses of a turbo system, heat of compression and turbo lag. Heat of compression simply means that as the turbo compresses the intake charge it also heats up. There is an intercooler in the system to remove some of that heat, there's even a dry ice transfer box to help it out, but it doesn't have the time to remove all of the heat. Speaking of time, there's also the problem of turbo lag. Turbo lag is the time between when the driver requests power and the turbo spools - I hate waiting! The nitrous oxide system is the perfect addition to a turbo charged car because it addresses the two major issues of the turbo. Unlike the turbo which compresses a gas, nitrous expands from a liquid, thus it comes out very cold and dense. A very small injection of nitrous can replace the oxygen in three times it's volume of compressed air from the turbo, and cool the intake charge at the same time. There's also no waiting for the nitrous bottle to spool up, the solenoid opens and the oxygen is there to be used. The combination of nitrous plus turbocharger has more potential to produce more power without turbo lag, and because the nitrous is only used when needed, the bottle lasts far longer between refills.
Medusa is an answer to the one weakness of other nitrous systems. Most systems have a button, when pushed it opens up fuel and nitrous solenoids and there is an instant boost in power. Not what I wanted, I want linear throttle response, no turbo lag and no button to push. That was a problem, when injected at the intake runners nitrous oxide tends to pool in the cylinder and blow the motor, so direct port injection can only be used at high RPMs. On the other hand, turbo enrichment upstream can be used to cool the intake charge at almost any RPM because the liquid nitrous oxide has time to boil to a gas. That's the real key to Medusa, being able to control the volume between the nitrous release point and the intake injection point. Medusa is basically a three stage NOS manifold, built directly into the main intake manifold. It's three stages include a single upstream injector at the air-water intercooler, a second stage split system with gas expansion volume and a third direct port stage. Using multiple RPM and pressure sensors it can open one, two or all three stages to meet the demands of the driver's right foot.
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