Hi mate, here's one reply to several questions I've raised;
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Interesting.
This is prompted by Mr Law's need to mitigate some of the detrimental effect of his very high under bonnet temps.
Water injection in the inlet plenum is very awkward to map and needs frequent refilling, great for the dedicated track car a pain for a road car.
Spraying onto the side mounted ICs' will work if controlled by sophisticated timing works and gets rid of the heat usually not into the engine bay, which is the goal also as this lessens the heat soak into the bay. An FMIC will not help in this last case as any heat given off will just be poured into an already overheated engine bay and lessening the effectiveness of the main engine cooler, the radiator.
There is some value in injecting some water in the inlet tract prior to the inlet air entering the compressor housing, this is very good at dropping 20degrees off the output temp. however you need quite short inlet runs and it must only work above 10psi so as to avoid condesation problems, a bit like driving in torrential rain, the car may splutter on backing off.
The best plan is to use the second of these options, and then deal with the heat build up problem, first you have an outside air intake (if not why not?) the air must contact the face of the filter as cold as possible it must never be warmed, no warm air from the engine bay must be allowed to enter the inlet tract, once past the filter this cold air must be conserved, so insulating pipes and pods is essential, the air must not be heated before it enters the compressor, now look at you exhaust system, and whilst you are at it, you must insulate the headers, NOT the turbos, thats fro racing cars only, insulating the headers after the turbines will lessen heat soak and give you about 3% more torque, be sure to carry the insulation as far along the exhaust as you can, within a foot of the cat is very good indeed (dont insulate the cat as it will over heat and the platinum catalyser will luxate into the substrate and you will be left with a dead cat. The air flowing from the compressors must be allowed to 'vent' into the engine bay it will be pretty hot at elevated pressures say 110-130C so let them get rid of what they can, use some copper to 'soak out' some of this prior to the IC.
The following is subject to verification next month: After the IC copper can be used to again to 'even' the system out .
Other things to help any car is to utilise the badly named venturi effect of some boy kits, as I had access to an Air Tunnel recently I tested a very simple side spat that i had designed for my car, the effect on flow into and out of the engine bay was that 15% more direct flow occurred, my car is very 'slippery' so this is a good result, the cost of the parts amounted to just £105 and are very discrete. I'm sure the effect can be replicated on any car.
Courtesy of Mycroft, GTR register - August 2002
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Just seems some of these guys understand more of the physics that's involved in cooling a high bhp motor, although as yet only a couple of guys with R33's have tried misting sprays on IC's, and no-one as yet copper as described above.
Luckily for these guys they dont rev as high as us, or generate the torque so low down the rev range, so heat isnt so much a problem as it is for us. Even so they have some really clever ideas which, in principal, we can apply.
What do you think?
Andicopperoo
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