Top Fuel Cars

724 Words2 Pages

Most road cars run off of gasoline, or pump gas. It is a very effective mixture that does its job well when it comes to internal combustion engines, but it’s not the most potent fuel mixture you can find. You may have heard of a type of racing called “Top Fuel”, it is the fastest type of racing in the world. Where your car may push out around 200 horsepower, the Top Fuel cars can have up to 10,000 horsepower, they can get to over 300 mph in less than 4 seconds. This insane speed is due to their massive engines, and very potent fuel, nitromethane. A 4 stroke engine has four steps to complete one cycle. First, there is the intake stroke; this is where the fuel mixture is pulled down into the engine. Second, there is the compression stroke; …show more content…

The gasoline (C8H18) and oxygen have to be at an almost perfect ratio. Usually for every 1 pound of fuel, it has to have close 15 pounds of air to burn properly. If this ratio is off, the car will struggle to run, or not run at all. This is why nitromethane can make so much power. When burning nitromethane, for every pound of nitromethane is burned, it only needs 1.7 pounds of air to burn. Technically speaking gasoline is more powerful, but since you can put a lot more nitromethane through the engine, you can make more power. Top Fuel dragsters can actually burn up to 1.5 gallons of fuel, every …show more content…

When normal gasoline is burned inside an engine, it burns completely, and then exits the engine through the exhaust. When nitromethane is ignited, it burns too slowly for it to burn fully. So when the exhaust valve opens in these engines, the fuel is still burning. This is why you see flames shooting out of the exhaust pipes on these dragsters. Another characteristic comes down to the pressure at which fuel is ignited. On most sports cars, they have a compression ratio of about 10:1. This means that when the fuel mixture is compressed fully, it is a tenth of the volume it was when it entered the engine. If the compression was any higher, the fuel would ignited just by pressure alone. Nitromethane can take insane pressure without being ignited prematurely, even so most dragsters only have a compression ratio of about 7:1, but they have four ignition sources where your car has

More about Top Fuel Cars

Open Document