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NOS can mean Nitrous Oxide, which is a chemical compound that lets you add more oxygen to the fuel system, which in turn gives it some more exploding force, which in turn gets the engine to run harder/put out more power. It’s like Five Hour Energies for your engine.
Engines run on oxygen and fuel. The more of both at the proper ratio, the more power, until mechanical failure, that is.
Nitrous *Oxide* (N2O) contains oxygen that will happily split from the nitrogen and react with the burning hydrocarbons (fuel) in an engine. The more fuel and oxygen an engine can burn, the more power it can make. Nitrous Oxide Systems force pressurized N2O into the engine along with extra fuel, which boosts power beyond normal passive air intakes and even turbo/superchargers, which pressurize normal atmospheric gases for intake into the engine.
So when your engine is running its constantly finding friends (oxygen) for all the fuel particles. When it pairs up these friends they push on the car to make it move on their way to go have fun outside.
Normally it looks for the fuels friends in the air around the car. But they are constantly pushed out of the way and bullied by the evil nitrogen. This makes it hard to find friends for the fuel to play with.
Now NOS is full of the fuels friends and there’s no bulles around to get in the way of the fuel finding its friends. This means there’s waaaaaay more pairs of friends to help push the car and in turn make it go faster.
NOS is N2O. It has several useful properties. It breaks down: 2N2O -> 2N2 + O2. Since air is about 4 parts N2 to 1 part O2, the decomposed N2O is richer in oxygen. So why not just use oxygen? You could (the answers that say you could not are wrong). You have to be careful not to use too much, but the problem is storage. If you store the oxygen as a compressed gas, you need a very large heavy gas cylinder to store even a modest amount of oxygen. Storing the oxygen as a liquid requires handling very, very cold liquid oxygen, which is expensive to do safely.
N2O is a liquid at normal temperatures at somewhere between 600 and 800 PSI. You can store a lot of it, in liquid form, at room temperature, in a bottle that isn’t all that heavy. As you draw off the N2O and use it in your car, the remaining liquid in the bottle will boil, until the pressure rises back to about what it was. This means the bottle stays at about the same pressure, without the need for a regulator. If you were using compressed O2, you’d start out with gas at at least 3000 PSI, and as you use it it the pressure would go down until you ran out. So you need a regulator. Depending on what output pressure you want and what flow rate of oxygen you want, that regulator can also be expensive.
Another useful feature of N2O. When it breaks down into N2 and O2, it releases energy, a lot. So not only is the N2O you inject into your car a relatively dense oxidizer, it is also an important source of energy for the engine.
An internal combustion engine uses controlled explosions. For an explosion you need a fuel, oxidizer and heat. Or in other words: Gasoline in a vacuum doesn’t explode (or burn). You have to add the right amount of oxidizer and provide heat (in the form of a spark, that’s what spark plugs are for). When you set gasoline on fire you use the oxygen from ambient air as oxidizer. Air is 78% nitrogen (N₂) and 21% oxygen (O₂) by volume. Nitrogen doesn’t react with the fuel and is pretty useless.
The more fuel you can burn, the more powerful your explosion. But to burn more fuel you need more oxidizer. Modern cars use turbochargers to compress air and force it into the engine. The disadvantage here is that 78% of it will still be nitrogen.
An obvious solution would be to get a bottle of pure oxygen and use that instead of the surrounding air. I’m not really sure why that’s not done for cars but apparently oxygen is much harder to store and handle than nitrous oxygen (NOS, N₂O). NOS still contains nitrogen but is a more powerful oxidiser than air. In addition it’s liquid under relatively low pressure and room temperature, giving you a very dense (-> powerful) oxidiser.
History lesson time:
In aviation, fighter pilots used to keep a reservoir of MW50/ methanolwasser 50 (a 50/50 mix of alcohol and water) that they would pump into their engines for a boost of engine power for dog fights. I would both cool the engine by evaporating, and add power by making the aviation fuel more flammable, but hotter.
Eventually, people messing with engines discovered that nitrous oxide (NOS tm) had a similar effect. But NO was a lot more potent and it could be used “dry” (compressed gas) or “wet” (compressed to a liquid state). The reasons we don’t use NO all the time are it is far more expensive compared to even racing fuels, and if your engine isn’t reinforced to handle the sudden increase of pressure it will turn it into a bomb.
NOS is a name of a company that’s called Nitrous Oxide Systems. They produce nitrous oxide injection systems for automotive uses
When nitrous oxide is injected and heated, it turns into nitrogen and oxygen. More oxygen in the system means you can burn more fuel, to make more power.
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