Sion

ok, what the hell, I'll take a shot at it.

very simply put, a NOS (nitrous oxide) system, when properly installed, injects nitrous oxide into the air-fuel charge prior to it entering the combustion chambers in an engine. this produces a short-term increase of power output.

the technical reasons for how and why it works (from howstuffworks.com):

"...sodium chlorate acts as a way to store oxygen. You release the oxygen in sodium chlorate by heating it. It turns out that nitrous oxide (N20) works exactly the same way. When you heat nitrous oxide to about 570 degrees F (~300 C), it splits into oxygen and nitrogen. So the injection of nitrous oxide into an engine means that more oxygen is available during combustion. Because you have more oxygen, you can also inject more fuel, allowing the same engine to produce more power. Nitrous oxide is one of the simplest ways to provide a significant horsepower boost to any gasoline engine.

Nitrous oxide has another effect that improves performance even more. When it vaporizes, nitrous oxide provides a significant cooling effect on the intake air. When you reduce the intake air temperature, you increase the air's density, and this provides even more oxygen inside the cylinder.

The only problem with nitrous oxide is that it is fairly bulky, and the engine needs a lot of it. Like any gas, it takes up a fair amount of space even when compressed into a liquid. A 5-liter engine running at 4,000 rotations per minute (rpm) consumes about 10,000 liters of air every minute (compared to about 0.2 liters of gasoline), so it would take a tremendous amount of nitrous oxide to run a car continuously. Therefore, a car normally carries only a few minutes of nitrous oxide, and the driver uses it very selectively by pushing a button."


ok, if you understood all that, now we get to the good part. instead of setting up the NOS system properly, so that the N2O charge would go into the air-fuel intake, so it could then enter the combustion chambers of the Corsica in question, they morons instead set it up so that it was being injected onto the intake camshaft. the intake cam controls the openning and closing of the intake valves. but it does not directly function as part of the plumbing that carries the air-fuel charge into the combustion chambers.

here is an analogy that might make it clear. if you scuba dive, you need a source of air so that you can continue to breathe while underwater. what these fools did was like scuba diving with the hose from the airtank stuck anywhere but in the mouth, where it needs to go so the air can get to your lungs.

follow?

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