The Ozone Injection: A Power Adder That Failed

It turns out that I wasn't the first person to think of ozone injection as a power adder for vehicles. Mad scientists have attempted to harness its potential, but sneaky variables have kept them from achieving their desired bonus horsepower. There are four main reasons why ozone injection has failed as a power adder.

Firstly, ozone exposure causes embrittlement and shrinkage to elastomers. Don't want that - elastomers are essential for operating a vehicle. One type of elastomer is rubber, which cars rely on in many ways, such as keeping air in your tires or oil from leaking between blocks and trans. These rubbers need to maintain their pliability to effectively hold these seals. If ozone comes into contact with these rubber items - such as gaskets and tires - they can cause their respective systems to poorly perform or even fail over time.

However, if you're a racer rebuilding your engine and components, you might not care about the degradation of those rubber components. The power performance you'll get in the short term might outweigh that issue. Another problem with ozone is the immense energy input needed to produce it. Even if we were able to generate this amount of energy with ease, we'd still have a problem - the heat generated by this much energy would be too intense unless you wanted your ozone generator to cause damage to your engine.

To mitigate this, you'd need to beef up the cooling system, which means adding more cooling fluid and hardware. This also means more weight, and now the cycle continues. Oh well, we'll just have to go another way. To make things worse, you can't really store ozone if you try to store it in a tank like nitrous oxide. It'll break down because ozone is unstable at high concentrations and has a pretty short half-life - meaning that over time, your stored ozone will decay into plain old oxygen.

Now, this isn't actually a major setback since ordinary oxygen is what feeds the combustion reaction. However, it's definitely wasteful in terms of energy at that point. It would be way more energy-efficient to just bottle, store, and inject diatomic oxygen instead. But you wouldn't want to use pure oxygen because we did an entire episode on nos and talked about using pure oxygen. If you want to learn more, click here - I already did the work, and I don't need to explain it in this video. Go watch that other video.

To cap it off, the most critical reason why ozone isn't feasible is the collection of legitimate health risks it poses to humans. Part of the genesis for this episode is when James and I on a D-List did a review of an ozone generator to reduce the smell of your car, and we found out that ozone generators are illegal in California. We thought, "Oh dude, ozone's those one good right? Like, ozone's good - well, it's good when it's way up there, but it's not good for us if we're breathing it in."

Ozone has a high oxidizing potential which causes respiratory issues, headaches, and burning eyes. List that goes on and on - it's bad stuff. You don't want to breathe it in. Remember earlier when we mentioned that ozone had antiviral and antibacterial properties? Yeah, that's because it kills things - the same mechanism that kills bacteria and viruses also harms human cells.

The EPA even released an article discouraging readers from investing in ozone generator-style air purifiers. In theory, these devices could remove weird smells or indoor air pollution from your house, but the risks they pose way outweigh the potential benefits. But those are health benefits - what about power benefits? I put my actual engineering degree to use for once and built an ozone generator. Stop right there - listen, I don't know if anybody told you, but California is an ozone no zone.

Uh, I didn't want to have to do this, but I'm going to need you to bend over, I'm going to handcuff you, and arrest you. Max, you're not allowed to arrest people anymore - you know that. Okay, I didn't want to have to do this either, but I'm going to have to write you a citation. Hope you learned your lesson.

Uh, all right, so since we can't show the ozone generator... Thanks thanks so much for watching. Uh, until next week bye for now. Come on, wheel out of here - you can't beat that outro.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: endo you ever wonder how you can get more power out of your engine okay so do i brother i love my catfish but it could benefit from making a couple extra ponies the thing is is i like the hardware under the hood so i don't want to go messing around with bolting on a supercharger or a turbocharger i can go without the wines and whistles as long as i can listen to the harmony of that sweet ls1 doing its thing i also don't want to squirt in knots i don't want to juice so if i don't want to use a supercharger or turbocharger or nos how the heck am i going to make more power well i got to thinking that the solution to my problem is an unlikely source protects all of us here on earth and it's dwindling away at a rapid rate the ozone well today we're going to see if ozone can be the secret ingredient into making more power in your engine let's go big thanks to dec for sponsoring today's video everyone loves trucks but are you tired of your stuff rattling around and making a mess does your back hurt from constantly crawling into your truck to find something well stop letting that bed go unchecked and get depth decked makes organizing accessing and securing my tools and dirt bike gear easy their full bed length drawer system is simple to install and can carry up to 200 pounds each that's half your mom they even roll out waist high so i'm not breaking my back to grab something and up top this floor has a true two thousand pound payload capacity see i could put two three four five six seven eight dirt bikes if i could fit them what i love most is that the drawers slide right underneath the weatherproof floor keeping everything i have safe from mother nature and thieves speaking of safety if your tailgate is locked you can't open the drawers or remove the system they also offer a full line of accessories like various toolboxes bags cargo tie-downs and other handy items for maximum organizational efficiency the deck drawer system is a hundred percent made in the usa backed by a three-year no hassle warranty and a second to none customer service team ready to answer all your questions so ditch that messy truck bed and click the link in the description below or go to deck.com bumper to bumper to get free shipping on your deck drawer system today now let's get back to some b2b slide me in for us in the quest for more power there's a simple equation got more air plus more fuel equals more power if we look at the air component of that equation a bit more what we really need is more oxygen oxygen mixed with the fuel source allows for combustion to take place and that combustion is the driving force for creating horsepower now when we're talking turbo chargers and superchargers that's forced induction and force induction works to increase the power of an engine by forcing in more air and therefore more oxygen into the combustion chamber bolt-ons like those physically force compressed air into the intake but there are other ways to add more oxygen into the mix and that's using chemicals chemicals like nitrous oxide nitrous oxide or n2o works in creating more power potential because it carries with it an oxygen molecule when it gets shot into the intake or directly into the cylinders depending on the configuration during the compression stroke that increasing pressure causes the no bond to break and the result of that is you have an added oxygen molecule inside the cylinder that can participate in the combustion reaction now before i said power potential because more oxygen by itself is not going to get you any additional power gains you need to supply more fuel to maintain your air fuel ratio if we burn more fuel in every power stroke we make more power if we can burn twice as much fuel now due to that added oxygen we can double the energy during combustion if twice the energy is produced from combustion the pistons move faster more specifically if twice the energy is produced the pistons will move faster by a factor of the square root of two here's a little equation just solve just solve for piston speed freaking genius now man is summer out because we're back in school but here is the catch nitrous oxide systems take up space in a car so just like anything else you have to find a place to store it so think about if you've got two big old tanks of nitrous they're filling up your back seat where's your grandma and your mom gonna sit when you're driving around town nowhere you have to put them on the roof florida style another downside to using nas is all the hardware is heavy yeah sure you'll be able to make more power but depending on how much power you're making it can outweigh the effect of all the weight a couple weeks ago we did a show discussing weight and power here on b2b if you're interested you should click here and watch and while you're at it why don't you like and subscribe that really helps us out thank you that's me kissing you an inevitable shortcoming to nas is that you have to use it sparingly you can't run nitrous oxide continuously on an everyday driver the limited supply of nitrous oxide actually gets used up pretty quickly that's why drag racers and fast and furious guys only use it intermittently so that's how nitrous works sneaking in a bit of free oxygen so you can add more fuel so you can make more power so where does ozone fit into this equation how can ozone help us in our quest to make power gains let's start with what ozone is exactly ozone consists of three oxygens connected via a single bond in a double bond technically ozone should be represented by a hybrid resonant structure to explain all that you need to dabble in a bit of quantum physics but we don't have time for that right now the key concept though to point out is that there are three oxygen atoms per molecule when you break the bonds in ozone it yields pure oxygen gas so by comparing this to nos from before what's better than one free oxygen molecule three free oxygen molecules that means we can burn three times the amount of fuel with each stroke now that we understand why we want to use ozone how in the world are we going to get it into my catfish to produce a little bit more power well there are two main components that i came up with the first method we can consider is modeling our ozone injection system after nos we generate the ozone away from the block we store it safely and then we deliver it to the cylinder upon command we push a little magic ozone button except instead of red it's green this would use nearly the exact same hardware as a nitrous oxide system in simple terms the necessary components would include your ozone the bottles to store it in the feed lines the intake fixtures and the electronics to control all of it very similar to how nos works now instead of having nitrous oxide in the bottle you have ozone the other option we could entertain is to incorporate the ozone generator as a component of the intake so if you think about it for a second if the ozone generator is on board the catfish could have in theory a regenerative power adder so now that we know what ozone is and understand why it could be more effective than nitrous oxide we have to figure out where to get it an ozone generator or some call it an ozonator is a device that simply produces ozone the machines were actually developed to be used for cleaning purposes ozone has antibacterial and antiviral properties so it's great for purifying air and water most personal use ozonators produce ozone by taking the oxygen o2 from ambient air and recreating it to produce ozone o3 synthesis of ozone happens by passing ambient oxygen through high voltage electrodes these electrodes serve to provide ample energy to disassociate the diatomic oxygen molecule into individual atoms these atoms then rearrange into o3 and o due to an increased energy input one of the main hassles with nitrous oxide systems is that the storage tanks need to be constantly refilled with an ozonator on board the driver can choose to use or produce more ozone at will so imagine hitting your little green button to dump your ozone reserve in a straight line and then hitting a red button to start generating ozone in the corners so i don't know about everyone watching but my engineering mind got really curious about this and this is the fact that sold me on this idea but i can't quite believe that i'd be the first person to think of this well it turns out that i was not the first person to think of this there are some mad scientists out there who've attempted greatness but some sneaky variables have kept them from getting those bonus horsepower and there are four main reasons why ozone injection has failed as a power adder the first reason is ozone exposure causes embrittlement and shrinkage to elastomers don't want that elastomers are essential to operate a vehicle one type of elastomer is rubber cars rely on rubbers in many ways whether it's keeping air in your tires or oil from leaking between your blocks and trans these rubbers need to maintain their pliability to effectively hold these seals if ozone comes in contact with these rubber items such as gaskets and tires they can cause their respective systems to poorly perform or even fail over time but if you're a racer and you're rebuilding your engine and rebuilding all those components you don't necessarily care about that the degradation of those rubber components doesn't outweigh the power performance you're going to get in the short term but another issue with ozone is the immense energy input needed to produce it even if we were able to generate this amount of energy with ease we'd still have a problem this much energy would generate a huge amount of heat unless you want that ozone generator to create enough heat to cause a ton of damage in the engine you're gonna need a way to cool it all beefing up the cooling system means adding more cooling fluid and hardware which also means more weight and now the cycle continues oh we'll go this way and to make things worse you can't really store ozone if you try to store ozone in a tank similar to nitrous oxide it'll break down ozone is unstable at high concentration and has a pretty short half-life meaning that over time your stored ozone will decay into plain old oxygen now this isn't actually a major setback since ordinary oxygen is what feeds the combustion reaction but it's definitely wasteful in terms of energy at that point it would be way more energy efficient just to bottle store and inject diatomic oxygen but you wouldn't want to use pure oxygen anyways we did an entire episode about nos and talked about using pure oxygen if you want to learn more click here i already did the work i don't need to explain it in this video go watch this other video to cap it off the most critical reason why ozone isn't feasible is the collection of legitimate health risks it poses to humans part of the genesis for this episode is james and i on a d-list did a review of an ozone generator to reduce the smell of your car and we found out that ozone generators are illegal in california and i thought oh dude ozone's those ones good right like ozone's good well it's good when it's way up there but it's not good for us if we're breathing it in ozone has a high oxidizing potential which causes respiratory issues headaches burning eyes list that goes on and on it's bad stuff you don't want to breathe it in remember earlier when we mentioned that ozone had antiviral and antibacterial properties yeah that's because it kills things the same mechanism that kills bacteria and viruses also harms human cells the epa even released an article discouraging readers from investing in ozone generator style air purifiers in theory these devices could remove weird smells or indoor air pollution from your house but the epa said the risks they pose way outweigh the potential benefits but those are health benefits what about power benefits i put my actual engineering degree to use for once and i built an ozone generator stop right there listen i don't know if anybody told you but california is an ozone no zone and uh i didn't want to have to do this but i'm going to need you to bend over i'm going to handcuff you and arrest you max you're not allowed to arrest people anymore you know that okay i didn't want to have to do this either but i i'm going to have to write you a citation i hope you learned your lesson uh all right so since we can't show the ozone generator thanks thanks so much for watching uh until next week bye for now come on wheel on out of here you can't beat in the outrodo you ever wonder how you can get more power out of your engine okay so do i brother i love my catfish but it could benefit from making a couple extra ponies the thing is is i like the hardware under the hood so i don't want to go messing around with bolting on a supercharger or a turbocharger i can go without the wines and whistles as long as i can listen to the harmony of that sweet ls1 doing its thing i also don't want to squirt in knots i don't want to juice so if i don't want to use a supercharger or turbocharger or nos how the heck am i going to make more power well i got to thinking that the solution to my problem is an unlikely source protects all of us here on earth and it's dwindling away at a rapid rate the ozone well today we're going to see if ozone can be the secret ingredient into making more power in your engine let's go big thanks to dec for sponsoring today's video everyone loves trucks but are you tired of your stuff rattling around and making a mess does your back hurt from constantly crawling into your truck to find something well stop letting that bed go unchecked and get depth decked makes organizing accessing and securing my tools and dirt bike gear easy their full bed length drawer system is simple to install and can carry up to 200 pounds each that's half your mom they even roll out waist high so i'm not breaking my back to grab something and up top this floor has a true two thousand pound payload capacity see i could put two three four five six seven eight dirt bikes if i could fit them what i love most is that the drawers slide right underneath the weatherproof floor keeping everything i have safe from mother nature and thieves speaking of safety if your tailgate is locked you can't open the drawers or remove the system they also offer a full line of accessories like various toolboxes bags cargo tie-downs and other handy items for maximum organizational efficiency the deck drawer system is a hundred percent made in the usa backed by a three-year no hassle warranty and a second to none customer service team ready to answer all your questions so ditch that messy truck bed and click the link in the description below or go to deck.com bumper to bumper to get free shipping on your deck drawer system today now let's get back to some b2b slide me in for us in the quest for more power there's a simple equation got more air plus more fuel equals more power if we look at the air component of that equation a bit more what we really need is more oxygen oxygen mixed with the fuel source allows for combustion to take place and that combustion is the driving force for creating horsepower now when we're talking turbo chargers and superchargers that's forced induction and force induction works to increase the power of an engine by forcing in more air and therefore more oxygen into the combustion chamber bolt-ons like those physically force compressed air into the intake but there are other ways to add more oxygen into the mix and that's using chemicals chemicals like nitrous oxide nitrous oxide or n2o works in creating more power potential because it carries with it an oxygen molecule when it gets shot into the intake or directly into the cylinders depending on the configuration during the compression stroke that increasing pressure causes the no bond to break and the result of that is you have an added oxygen molecule inside the cylinder that can participate in the combustion reaction now before i said power potential because more oxygen by itself is not going to get you any additional power gains you need to supply more fuel to maintain your air fuel ratio if we burn more fuel in every power stroke we make more power if we can burn twice as much fuel now due to that added oxygen we can double the energy during combustion if twice the energy is produced from combustion the pistons move faster more specifically if twice the energy is produced the pistons will move faster by a factor of the square root of two here's a little equation just solve just solve for piston speed freaking genius now man is summer out because we're back in school but here is the catch nitrous oxide systems take up space in a car so just like anything else you have to find a place to store it so think about if you've got two big old tanks of nitrous they're filling up your back seat where's your grandma and your mom gonna sit when you're driving around town nowhere you have to put them on the roof florida style another downside to using nas is all the hardware is heavy yeah sure you'll be able to make more power but depending on how much power you're making it can outweigh the effect of all the weight a couple weeks ago we did a show discussing weight and power here on b2b if you're interested you should click here and watch and while you're at it why don't you like and subscribe that really helps us out thank you that's me kissing you an inevitable shortcoming to nas is that you have to use it sparingly you can't run nitrous oxide continuously on an everyday driver the limited supply of nitrous oxide actually gets used up pretty quickly that's why drag racers and fast and furious guys only use it intermittently so that's how nitrous works sneaking in a bit of free oxygen so you can add more fuel so you can make more power so where does ozone fit into this equation how can ozone help us in our quest to make power gains let's start with what ozone is exactly ozone consists of three oxygens connected via a single bond in a double bond technically ozone should be represented by a hybrid resonant structure to explain all that you need to dabble in a bit of quantum physics but we don't have time for that right now the key concept though to point out is that there are three oxygen atoms per molecule when you break the bonds in ozone it yields pure oxygen gas so by comparing this to nos from before what's better than one free oxygen molecule three free oxygen molecules that means we can burn three times the amount of fuel with each stroke now that we understand why we want to use ozone how in the world are we going to get it into my catfish to produce a little bit more power well there are two main components that i came up with the first method we can consider is modeling our ozone injection system after nos we generate the ozone away from the block we store it safely and then we deliver it to the cylinder upon command we push a little magic ozone button except instead of red it's green this would use nearly the exact same hardware as a nitrous oxide system in simple terms the necessary components would include your ozone the bottles to store it in the feed lines the intake fixtures and the electronics to control all of it very similar to how nos works now instead of having nitrous oxide in the bottle you have ozone the other option we could entertain is to incorporate the ozone generator as a component of the intake so if you think about it for a second if the ozone generator is on board the catfish could have in theory a regenerative power adder so now that we know what ozone is and understand why it could be more effective than nitrous oxide we have to figure out where to get it an ozone generator or some call it an ozonator is a device that simply produces ozone the machines were actually developed to be used for cleaning purposes ozone has antibacterial and antiviral properties so it's great for purifying air and water most personal use ozonators produce ozone by taking the oxygen o2 from ambient air and recreating it to produce ozone o3 synthesis of ozone happens by passing ambient oxygen through high voltage electrodes these electrodes serve to provide ample energy to disassociate the diatomic oxygen molecule into individual atoms these atoms then rearrange into o3 and o due to an increased energy input one of the main hassles with nitrous oxide systems is that the storage tanks need to be constantly refilled with an ozonator on board the driver can choose to use or produce more ozone at will so imagine hitting your little green button to dump your ozone reserve in a straight line and then hitting a red button to start generating ozone in the corners so i don't know about everyone watching but my engineering mind got really curious about this and this is the fact that sold me on this idea but i can't quite believe that i'd be the first person to think of this well it turns out that i was not the first person to think of this there are some mad scientists out there who've attempted greatness but some sneaky variables have kept them from getting those bonus horsepower and there are four main reasons why ozone injection has failed as a power adder the first reason is ozone exposure causes embrittlement and shrinkage to elastomers don't want that elastomers are essential to operate a vehicle one type of elastomer is rubber cars rely on rubbers in many ways whether it's keeping air in your tires or oil from leaking between your blocks and trans these rubbers need to maintain their pliability to effectively hold these seals if ozone comes in contact with these rubber items such as gaskets and tires they can cause their respective systems to poorly perform or even fail over time but if you're a racer and you're rebuilding your engine and rebuilding all those components you don't necessarily care about that the degradation of those rubber components doesn't outweigh the power performance you're going to get in the short term but another issue with ozone is the immense energy input needed to produce it even if we were able to generate this amount of energy with ease we'd still have a problem this much energy would generate a huge amount of heat unless you want that ozone generator to create enough heat to cause a ton of damage in the engine you're gonna need a way to cool it all beefing up the cooling system means adding more cooling fluid and hardware which also means more weight and now the cycle continues oh we'll go this way and to make things worse you can't really store ozone if you try to store ozone in a tank similar to nitrous oxide it'll break down ozone is unstable at high concentration and has a pretty short half-life meaning that over time your stored ozone will decay into plain old oxygen now this isn't actually a major setback since ordinary oxygen is what feeds the combustion reaction but it's definitely wasteful in terms of energy at that point it would be way more energy efficient just to bottle store and inject diatomic oxygen but you wouldn't want to use pure oxygen anyways we did an entire episode about nos and talked about using pure oxygen if you want to learn more click here i already did the work i don't need to explain it in this video go watch this other video to cap it off the most critical reason why ozone isn't feasible is the collection of legitimate health risks it poses to humans part of the genesis for this episode is james and i on a d-list did a review of an ozone generator to reduce the smell of your car and we found out that ozone generators are illegal in california and i thought oh dude ozone's those ones good right like ozone's good well it's good when it's way up there but it's not good for us if we're breathing it in ozone has a high oxidizing potential which causes respiratory issues headaches burning eyes list that goes on and on it's bad stuff you don't want to breathe it in remember earlier when we mentioned that ozone had antiviral and antibacterial properties yeah that's because it kills things the same mechanism that kills bacteria and viruses also harms human cells the epa even released an article discouraging readers from investing in ozone generator style air purifiers in theory these devices could remove weird smells or indoor air pollution from your house but the epa said the risks they pose way outweigh the potential benefits but those are health benefits what about power benefits i put my actual engineering degree to use for once and i built an ozone generator stop right there listen i don't know if anybody told you but california is an ozone no zone and uh i didn't want to have to do this but i'm going to need you to bend over i'm going to handcuff you and arrest you max you're not allowed to arrest people anymore you know that okay i didn't want to have to do this either but i i'm going to have to write you a citation i hope you learned your lesson uh all right so since we can't show the ozone generator thanks thanks so much for watching uh until next week bye for now come on wheel on out of here you can't beat in the outro