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<x-charset iso-8859-1>Heat causes N2O to break up into nitrogen and oxygen. Now air is a mixture of nitrogen (80%) and Oxygen (20%), while pure N2O becomes a mixture of about 66% Nitrogen and 33% Oxygen by volume. Is it normally used mixed with some air? You can see there is an increased proportion of oxygen in the mix so you can burn proportionately more fuel with each charge of air or N2O. Pure oxygen would increase the amount of fuel that could be completely burned, but so much extra energy would be produced that temperatures would rise too high for the engine, not to mention shock loading as the combustion gases would expand much more rapidly. The Nitrogen plays a useful job in a normal air induction engine by expanding with the heat and pushing on the piston. (Apologies to any chemist for not going into HTML for the subscript '2' - cries of NO! from Greg? I guess a strange combination of alt and numbers would get subscript '2'). Dave. UK VW Type 3 & 4 Club http://www.hallvw.clara.co.uk/ ------ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Too much? Digest! mailto:type3-d-request@vwtype3.org Subj=subscribe </x-charset>