Chinayoungboy

I am salesman of Nitromethane. One day, one of my customers asked me that if he can add the Nitromethane to gas or diesel oil.
I don't have an idea. and he also asked me if it is used with feul Fuel antiknock additive as MTBE and MMT.

thank you!

Kevin

jetpack

My Feedback: (1)

I don't think there's ever been too much science regarding this because this type of fuel would be considered illegal in racing, which where most of our testing comes from.

As far as performance or damage that could be done has always been left up to the tester.

Nitromethane by itself does not burn, its only supplies more oxygen to the burn. Adding it to gasoline would be the same thing as running very high octane fuel, which involves motor knowlege and reworking to run safely. Adding nitro to an engine that is designed to run gasoline will also destroy any type of rubber seals it may contain.

Only my 2 cents...........

gkamysz

My Feedback: (19)

Nitromethane certainly does burn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitromethane

jetpack

My Feedback: (1)

Nitro by itself does not burn. Pure nitromethane is an insensitive explosive. It needs to be cut with a host to be considered a burn.

wjvail

My Feedback: (3)

I've got a 55 gallon drum of 99.97% pure nitro sitting in the driveway. If I pour some in a cup and put a match in it, there is a wooff and then a pretty blue flame.

Also, none of the above is correct. Octane is a rating of resistance to detonation. You can easily and safely run 110 octane racing gas in your daily street car with no modification.

I'm not sure what you are saying but I'm pretty sure it also is incorrect. If mixed with an alkali or contained and compressed it could become an explosive. Used as a fuel in it's pure state, it is NOT explosive.

Bill Vail

XJet

Well I've never been able to ignite pure nitro in the way you describe.

Dropping lighted matches into a cup partly filled with nitro *always* results in the match going out and no ignition of the liquid.

I believe the vapor pressure is all wrong for it to burn easily when poured into a cup at room temperature and attempts are made to ignite it with a simple flame source.

Perhaps your nitro isn't quite as pure as you've been told it is :-)

Jezmo

There is no way to know what the ambient temp was the day he threw in the match but that would surely matter. Since the flash point of nitromethane is 36C or about 97F there is the possibility that he was in 100+ degree temps and therefore he had vapor in his cup. Also, in his driveway, it may have been heated by the Sun to the point of vaporization. Since it would have to be in vapor form to burn and on a 100 deg day there would be vapor in the cup it is possible that it did burn. At least that is the way I understand it. If there are any chemists out there that can show where that is wrong please do, I will be greatful for the knowledge. [8D]

Sport_Pilot

People get this mixed up. Nitro is a monopropellent. That means that it is possible to burn with no additional air. That is not the same as an explosive which burns at a rate so fast that it causes a damaging pressure wave. It is not contact sensitive, I think there is only one occasion of it blowing up on contact when in shipment, in this case the tanker had been hauling an alkali substance that wasn't washed down, the result was that it made it contact sensitive and a small collision made it blow up.

Dragsters take advantage of its monopropellent properties and run 100% nitro (it doesn't need any other fuel to burn), as rich as possible. The only two limitations are that the richer the mixture the harder it is to ignite, thus the huge dual magnetoes; the other is hydro lock.

downunder

Although nitro can be a monopropellant it provides more heat energy when combined with oxygen and used as a fuel. This is why dragsters have a huge supercharger on them . It's possible that in our engines some of the nitro might self-ignite but that's not its main purpose.

Sport_Pilot

That is incorrect, as a monopropellent there is more fuel to burn, even if there is less energy per pound. The reason they have a supercharger is to compress the air, which allows an even richer mixture per volume, but less per pound. They cannot run as a monopropellent because it cannot be ignited with a spark and no air, and the hydrolock would break the engine. None of the nitro in our engines self ignite, detonation is caused by the more rapid flame front. After the flame front has traveled through the cylinder the fuel then actually burns more slowly than gas or methanol. However this is in part because of the rich mixture and lack of oxygen. In fact the fuel complets burning when it goes out the stack and comes in contact with air to burn off the partially burned fuel which is mostly unburned hydrogen, hydrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, and nitric acid.

wvarn1957

My Feedback: (3)

You can mix nitromethane with gasoline, but there are some precautions that need to be observed since some very unstable compounds can form with nitromethane/gasoline mixes. The drag racing community has used these mixes in the past, but there have been some accidents with high (30%+ nitromethane in gasoline) concentrations. First, always pour the nitromethane into gasoline that is constantly agitated. If you pour gasoline into nitromethane, the interface contrentation is high enough to form the unstable compounds even though the final mixture is intended to be less than 30%.

Nitro can be safely mixed with methanol at any ratio, but with hydrocarbons, the potential for formation of unstable organo-nitro compounds is always a concern. These compounds are unstable and can decompose explosively with very little energy input.

balsaeater

Nitromethane according to wiki is a mono propelant

But all my reasearch shows this is not true
in very specialized 371 bar lab experments it ignites

in the real world it needs another fule like methonal to burn it

the pulse jet guys have tried most every fuel combo there is and they could not get pure nitro to keep burning

The fuel is not totaly knock sensitive as in if in a solid conatainer and dropped or stuck it might explode so a flex container like thin tin or plastic is better

the ignition temperature is high like 300 plus and the vapour is high double the other fuels nearly 60 degrees
it has a slow burn

it reguire two parts of air to burn totaly but can be made to burn without air in labs mostly

adding chemicals like alkilines or acids or similar will make it knock sensitive and adding fuels like 10% methonal will make it les knock sensitive

For drag racing one company will not give them pure nitro anymore so its cut down to 85% probably for safty reasons


If you burn nitro you make some nitric acid and this will make you lungs stop using oxegen and you can die so with drag racers they wear breathing gear

the nitro is not carsonagenic that I could find but its nasty in its pure form with acid like qualities

my reasearch shows that drag racers are the only real experts on this subject
and modelers sometimes know something
drag racers dont use 100% nitro but todays rules its 85% and before it was 95%

but drag racers have won with 10% nitro as 85% IS THE MAX

Using pure nitro is some 100 times more costly than normal gasoline fuel and some 20 to 25 times times more than using methonal
but you can get doble or mayby 2.5 times the HP

The drag racing group run the motor for 4 seconds use ~4 litres per second ~one galllon and some ~60 litres total with warming up

The ~85 kg ~200lbs weight ~ 500 cubic inch motor generates some 7000 BHP or ~90 hp to each kilo engine weight or 2lbs of motor and about the same BHP as a jumbo jet motor and after two seconds has melted the plugs and is deiseling the motor
The nitro fuel pulls heat away so the higher the nitro the coler the engine

The blower is using 800bhp at 40PSI to ram more air into the motor

The amount of fuel is two spoons of fuel to each cycinder per stroke roughly and the the fuel is so dificult to ignite they need two spark plugs with some 80 amps each to get fuel to ignite
the firing is way way in advance due to nitro being slow to burn

The fuel is mostly unburnt as nitro burn slowly gets ejected into the exhast plume breaks into hydrogen and ignites with atmoshere to make yellow flame and the rocket push down affect helps to keep the drag car nose on the ground until 300mph when tail plane makes 6 tons of down push on the tail

The weird bit is normally with a internal combustion motor you expect with turbulace to lose 40% of the power compared to using the fuel in a direct jet pulsar motor or rocket motor but it dosnt seem to be the case with the dragsters

not bad when you figure the average 500 cu inch motor makes like 200BHP

And with drag racing the power motor ratio 90:1 seems to better nasa rocket motors at typical 75 to 1 so the drag racers should be in charge of nasa


Any way the problem in the world is that nitro methane costs $30 a gal in the USA and double that elsewhere [:@]

which as far as I can see is stupid as it only made from natural gas best I can tell and should probably really cost at most the double the price of normal gasoline and natural gas fuel is more abundant and less controled by the arabs and ships easy in big special LPG ships

Which again is really stupid as with near pure nitro motors we could easly have really small 100 cc motors which make 200bhp that would drive cars with a motor weight of next to nothing like a few kg instead of 90kgs and knock 50% the weight of cars and get closer to 100 mpg easy peasy and the fuel is less difficult than petrol
and still cost similar to run the car as gasoline if the price for nitro was more like $4 to $6 a gallon
but at $30 a gallon the brain dead nitro making companies are keeping themselfs away from ruling the gasoline roost


and to cap it all the MIT have worked out that america can get all its electrical power from geo thermal power and so it dosnt need to omport arab oil at all

Man america must be really rich if they can waste everthing like that and still square the circle


Balsaeater

Smittys