Thread: Nitromethane and alcohol ?'s

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Maybe I glossed over a detail. While you can write a simple equation for a combustion reaction, in the actual event there is a lot of "hells-a-poppin" collisions between hot molecules that break bonds to give broken pieces with an odd number of electrons while nature prefers compounds with an even number of electrons. They break more until some even combination of electrons is reached in the final results at a lower energy. While an engine running at 5000 rpm only fires 2500 times per minute that is a relatively long time of about (2500/60) times per second or about 0.024 seconds per explosion. Compare this to molecular collisions of about 10**30 collisions per second in one cubic cm (about 0.061 cu in). That is about (1 million)x(1 million)x(1 million)x(1 million)x(1 million) collisions per second in one cubic cm. This means that to study combustion reactions the formation and destruction of many intermediate fragments of molecules have to be accounted for and so once nitromethane gets started fragmenting, that O2 part can come off and be available for reaction to form CO2. Even at high rpm the mechanical parts of an engine are moving much slower than the chemical reactions.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder