yes that invisible flame is areal worry. I remember a picture of a VL turbo drag car with the bonnet flying off and the heat ripples high above the engine bay and roof of the car, everyone standing back! anyone walking up to it wouldnt know it until too late.

I played with water injection myself and comncluded the reason everyone uses big ugly intercoolers and pipes instead of a neat little extra injector is that water injection is too hard to control. its ok at constant revs and constant load, and works well and has great cooling like that. But I found trying to get a small enough jet to not interfere with rough idling and accelleration in gears a real problem. it needs to be so small that it easily blocks up. to do it with any success I reckon it would need to be ecu controlled for flow, just vacuum suction doesnt work.

For the methanol injection, he may as well just grab a NOS kit, if the engine is being built for drags it should handle a 100hp shot, and that also cools things down.

Yes i was reading an article about the lack of
control over a water/methanal injector.
When the article was writtenn they
mentioned there was no ECU available at
the time to pulse the extra injector to
acheive the variable duty cycle they
required.

methanol is corrosive to fuel system components.
after each meeting you will have to drain the fuel ,remove all the plugs and squirt crc into cyls, flush entire fuel system .its a lot of work
i have never seen an efi car that didnt get a sticky injector at some stage and hurt the motor. they can even hydraulic

c16 is corrosive to seats and even alloy heads. and its EXPENSIVE

toluene (good octane/ booster knock suppressant)is carcinogenic

e85 sounds really good (85% ethanol)

if the car is drag only constant flow mechanical injection is not a bad option

nitro (CH3NO3) is very expensive and you need lots of it and lots of methanol to go with it .i dont think anyone has used nitro with efi yet you would need dozens of injectors

nitrous (N2O) is good fun BUT you had better be a good tuner or you will end up with a sump full of shrapnel. if you have signs of light detonation do not add fuel. that makes more power and more detonation. you must reduce nitrous first. think of it as a bottle of boost

water/meth injection can be triggered with a hobbs switch when boost comes on. even a washer bottle pump will make 40 psi. you can make a setup for a couple of bucks. make sure nozzle cant fall into intake. wrc cars inject water/meth mix at lots of points in engine.
air intake before turbo,before intercooler, after , direct into manifold ,just before throttle body

you get the picture
all alternative fuels have pros and cons and petrol comes out looking pretty good
dazza

E85 is more corrosive than methanol. New cars have special rubber parts, and a completely sealed fuel system to keep moisture out. You'd have to do the same to your classic car to work with E85 (or else drain the tank after every meet, etc. just like methanol)

On the topic of water vs intercooling, I'm a little cynical and think that some of the reason is that there's a lot more money to be made selling big air-air intercoolers (admittedly the price has come down with some of the chinese gear) so every workshop has their drag car 'flagship' with a huge air to air at the front.

Some people also worry that water can't 'work' since it's relatively speaking, so low tech. For sure you can get more out of a system with a variable rate of water delivery, but given the up front costs of a diy setup, it's pretty hard to justify much else when on a budget.

If I was going to go to an intercooler at all, I'd personally prefer a water to air, since they can be much smaller for the same overall cooling effect. With coolant and dry ice chips in the reservoir you can actually get a water to air intercooler to cool the charge below ambient temps, something that is physically impossible with an air to air.

want about fmic's with water sprayer's :) mines very cold ( on the cool side of the cooler , and $400 fmic kit pipe's clamps ect ect

how long you want to run
air to air is air to air
once air to water is heat soaked it acts like air to air anyway (air - water -air)
drag racing? 10 seconds? air to water(dry ice -60 deg c) for sure. but your tune up had better have enough safety margin for when you run out of ice and the intake temp jumps 100 deg
if you have a ute you can put a water radiator in the tray for intercooling perfect!
whats wrong with a front mount and water inj
dazza

how much money do you think nissan spent on r&d on the gtr (now add a couple zeros).if there was a better way they would have done it

I'll try and offer some responses to the points raised. I'll say at the outset, I'm not the best writer in the world, so if any of this comes of as being any way negative or something, please attribute it to my communication skills, and not to any attitude or arrogance or anything on my part!

The case of the GTR skylines is a good one to raise. It might be worth noting that as raced at one point in Aus, they did in fact add water mist spray to the brake discs, as that (in this very specific context) was capable of far greater cooling than all the available air going to the brakes. It's also worth noting that the added problem is the brake discs reach their hottest temp (obviously) at the end of a long braking distance, and at the same time, the airflow under/through the car and hence brake discs gets lower and lower, due to the car slowing, so the cooling available drops.

The reason I add this tid-bit is that the air-air intercooler will be in exactly the same boat for the first portion of any acceleration run, where airflow through the fins would be lower. Thankfully the turbo has just started outputting higher temps and there's some mass of alloy in the intercooler body itself which will take care of some of the heat until the car picks up more speed.

Certainly if you ran a dry ice/coolant reservoir (let's say for argument's sake it's just an esky sealed somewhere so no CO2 gets to the cockpit or anything!) _eventually_ you will get to the point all the CO2 is gone, and the coolant temp will rise. But this will take _ages_ (in racing terms).

The thing is, volume for volume at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, water has about 200 odd times the density/mass of air, and as such 200 times the heat transfer ability. Meaning a relatively small quantity of it will still take a while to heat up. There's a reason cars use water/coolamt for their main cooling system, it's just so much more efficient size for size - look at some old air cooler VW motors, and the static comps they can and can't safely run on pump fuel vs some water jacketed engines of the same era, and the vws also run oil coolers as standard to help cope)...The cooling system is of interest because it deals with the heat of _combustion_ that isn't successfully harnessed and used to turn the crank (and even modern engines aren't all that thermally efficient) - which is a truckload of heat, with an intercooler we are only dealing with the heat which is a byproduct of the _compression_ of the air by the turbo. Relatively speaking less heat to deal with, and therefore not requiring a massive amount of water to work.

There are still of course inefficiencies with water to air, but it's not a dead loss.

About the best demonstration I can think of to show the effectiveness of water to air is to get a piece of steel bar, and heat with an oxy till it's bright red. Now place the biggest fan you can find on it, a few if you have them, and time how long it takes to cool to the point it can be handled without gloves. Now repeat the heat up process and drop it into a bucket of water, and it'll be done in seconds.

Yes, the water might _eventually_ (for sake of argument) reach 100C. At which point it would have a change of state, esp at the 'hot' side and the intercooling effect would be stuff all. But let's consider an alternative - perhaps not drag racing, say circuit racing. Well instead of having an esky in the back with the dry ice, alternately there could simply be a second radiator, functioning much a car radiator, this one to take heat back out of the intercooler's coolant circuit. With this on board it could constantly be taking some of the heat back out. Now if it was properly sealed so it could retain pressure as the temp rises, the water in it would no longer turn to steam, and would still cool. The thing to remember is that even at 100C that water flowing through the core can still take a lot of heat out of the intake charge. It's not hard to have turbo compressor outlet temperatures well above 100C. Well above it. So it can still do a lot of work. And if the setup was such that the turbo compressor outlet wasn't a hell of a lot above 100C in the first place, then the water in the water to air intercooler would never get that hot anyway and would therefore always be taking heat out of the system. Additionally with the option of the radiator to cool the charge, that will effectively be cooling all the time there is any airflow through the core (to varying degrees). There's no racing in the world (tractor pulling is about the most brutal, and certainly an exception and you'll note that water injection is, if allowed, a big deal in that arena) where you are actually at full throttle/boost indefinitely. It's usually not more than 10-20 seconds at a time, and every time you are off the throttle, or just at lower/medium throttle, there isn't a lot of heat being produced by the turbo comrpessor side, so the water to air intercooler has some 'down time' where it can cool off to some degree for the next time the throttle/boost is ramped up. It doesn't actually take a huge radiator to allow sufficient cooling for this to be adequate to never overheat under racing conditions.

Further on the 100C water scenario - it's obviously no groundbreaking insight that the amount of heat energy required to raise water each 1c (as much as it is) isn't linear with that required to take it from 99-101C (I'm blurring the goalposts there for the sake of simplicity) - i.e. a change of state from liquid to gas (steam) is significantly greater, and a hell of a lot of heat energy can be absorbed just in the effort to achieve any substantial extent of change of state.

Some of the water to air cooling 'cores' (if you could call them that) have some decent designs as far as effectively transferring heat into the intercooler coolant medium itself. If you check out some of the online patents websites, there's a couple detailing 'laminova' water to air cooling. They use water passages with thin fins all the way around for maximum surface exposure with limited (relatively) disruption and restriction of flow. From reading what little I could on said patents, it seems they were initially conceived and developed for other cooling (I think transmission, but don't quote me) and someone took the idea and adapted it to intake charge cooling. Certainly worth a google search or two.

I'd also add that once you get to some serious boost levels, and of course the bigger the engine/boost level the worse it gets) the size air-air cooler being used is humungous, requiring bumper/grill/radiator panel surgery just to clear, and that carries with it strong risk of attention from the boys in blue, possibly rendering the car unroadworthy if any of the cut away areas are deemed structural, and also the increased risk of debris on the road damaging it, such is it's geater 'target area' for anything to hit it.


They aren't a 'free ride' and there are reasons I can think of that some if not many manufacturers opt for air to air intercoolers. The first would be simplicity/economic factors. Since they aren't paying the massive markup we end users would have to to have a single intercooler produced, they can fit the air-air quite cheaply. Important too is the fact that the air-air _does_ indeed work, and work well, certainly effective enough for typical factory boost levels. That said, it's no surprise that one of the first mods people look at on a lot of factory turbo/performance cars (beyond some really elementary stuff like freer exhaust from the turbo on back and perhaps the odd couple of psi) is a bigger intercooler, because the factory one isn't enough to cope with much more than factory boost levels.

There's also nothing to 'break' but the cooler itself. if it springs a leak, you'll likely hear it, or lose boost and the problem will be found, no harm, no foul (apart from core/cooler repair). If a water to air springs a leak, it could get into the intake. Probably not enough to hydraulicise (and under boost it'd be pushing air into the water to air, not sucking water into the intake). But without the water, they provide no cooling, so the first sign would potentially be a damaged engine. Same goes if the pump itself fails. Given this risk, no doubt more than a few manufacturers, wanting to idiot proof their new cars against some owners, try and take all the human error out of the equation. Similar to water injetion. As effective as it is, they wouldn't want to rely on all owners to monitor it, or even fill it if they used a warning light when levels were low, and the issue of the pump failure.

I can't speak for everone into older cars, but I think it's fair to say that there's more of a hands on ethic with such enthusiasts, so nobody here or in other car enthusiast groups of a similar nature would be the ones to neglect stuff discussed above and damage their engine with a water to air. But it's a different proposition to car manufacturers. Another example might be ABS. In an emergency most drivers will panic and jam on the brakes, locking them up, and in such situations, a skidding tyre has lost grip, so braking distances are longer. With ABS, in that situation, it would reduce braking distance. But the nature of how abs works means that if you hypothetically took a very highly skilled driver, who has practiced emergency stops and hypothetically won't panic when a real accident is imminent, if they applied the brakes, but were skilled enough to avoid lockup, and kept it all at the limit of the brakes, the stopping distances would actually be shorter than with ABS. Similarly on dirt/gravel, it's actually advantageous to lock up the brakes in some situations, as it starts to act like a bulldozer bunching up gravel in front of the tyres like a little wedge and actually improves the ability to stop. ABS in such a situation can be far worse. Now does this mean that ABS is rubbish? Of course not, it's just indicative of the fact that manufacturers have other priorities than optimal performance with a skilled/knowledgeable operator.

Having said all that, aside from cheaper air-air stuff coming in from China, many people here would be running relatively small engines, and so you can get absolute bargains by sourcing second hand air-air coolers from people with larger motors who are upgrading. Something like those off series 4/5 rx7s would work well. Around 2000-2001 they were available 'for a song' from many rotary workshops. No idea their availability or pricing more recently though!

I'm absolutely not suggesting air-air is worthless, just bringing up the fact that there is some real (and mostly unexploited) potential with water to air coolers. There was a time when lpg was considered taxi fuel and nobody here took it even remotely serious as having potential in performance cars. Now, it's a fairly well accepted fact (as it has been in parts of the USA/Canada). In other parts of the world where propane/lpg is in its infancy, you'll find many thinking 'you lose power' on lpg. Technically correct in some applications, but if a motor is built for it to start with, then it's not the case. Same goes for water to air - if it's poorly implemented, it's a dog, but done right, different kettle of fish.

lol well lads after extensive discussion and much dileberationm i thank u all for ur insite and now feel more edeucated on the subject of methanol, i also beleive that methanol would not suit a ca18 set up for large amouts of gas, unless i had lots of money which of course i dont being 18 and all, c16 here i come


well first had a dollop of c16 with a large helping of gas, sprinkle with lots of loud peddle and of course a splash of transbake is up to you

is it a turbo set up??? just a question cos i thought turbo had to be lower compression and i know methanol u need to run at least 12-13:1>>>> which isn't low by any means