ok wop, scooter, spooner, goofyguy, etc let me know if im crazy

[pclear9061]

i was just in my bosses office talking to him about the hot and cold air difference with driving and i just had an idea pop into my empty head with the dry ice box intake ordeal ..........

can we take a dry ice machine that is "cold air" right ... and take that and basicly "blow" it into the intake and have that as a cooling process. cant the engine handle the ""fog"" its just air isnt it? i mean can it do any harm?

[Sp00ner]

Right... except that pumping a carbon dioxide mist into your cyls is NOT going to help things...

[pclear9061]

wont it cool down the air tho? or is it just the carbon dioxide just gonna kill things in the engine?

[XxGarbSxX]

How about surrounding the intake piping with insulated containers for dry ice?

[pclear9061]

thats the thing there not that much room in there right? where would we put it?

[dazednconfused75]

Make a box that goes where the stock box went. You'd have to have an intake and a metal box so it won't crack. Just an alluminum box that fits around the intake. It would work...right?

[pclear9061]

well you would have to have the CAI then b/c if you have a shorty then it wouldnt

[DanM]

I think the question with any project idea like this is whether the gains are enough to offset the losses.

The engine eats a lot of air. I believe you would need a substantially large machine to do that, and that to power that substantially large machine would more than outweigh any gains.

But I'm kinda curious now, so maybe we can figure this out with some simplistic calcs....

2.0L @ 6000rpm is 6000L/min or about 210cfm. 12psi maybe translates to a 1.7x increase, so let's say for shits and giggles 350cfm. That's about 13kg of air per minute. To cool it by, let's say 30 degC, you'd need about 400kJ/min or 6500 Watts. That's about 22000Btu/hr (9hp) to cool all the air your engine needs by 30 degC. That means assuming 100% efficiency, this device would need 9hp to run it. Of course it's not 100%, so it would need more.

I think that's generally the problem with these type of ideas. Our freezers or air conditioners or whatever are never 100% efficient, so you end up just costing yourself more than you gain.

[dazednconfused75]

I was just thinking of a box full of dry ice to surround the cai. Blowing anything into the engine doesn't seem like it's lucrative enough.

[DanM]

Originally Posted by dazednconfused75

I was just thinking of a box full of dry ice to surround the cai. Blowing anything into the engine doesn't seem like it's lucrative enough.

Well that wouldn't hurt. But again, the idea of the above is to say that there's actually a LOT of air flow, and that to cool it appreciably at all, you need a LOT of cooling power. I'm going to hazard a guess that a little box of dry ice won't make any difference you can feel... it just won't absorb that much thermal energy fast enough to cool the air much. I've heard of people using dry ice before, but more as a "between runs" cooling thing than attempting to cool the intake charge. I imagine you'd need a fair bit, and then is the added power enough to offset the added mass? Or the inconvenience of having the stick ice under there?? I dunno, good question for sure... someone try it and see.