it's pouring here and i'm waiting for the garage to warm up a bit before i go back down to work on the kit, so i thought i might pass along some info
i did some testing the other day - i was checking to see how effective some old and new improvements were - i was looking into underhood temps - this comes into play when contemplating a supercharger, as any increase in underhood temp translates to increased intake temp
in designing this kit, one of the critical components is keeping the supercharger cool - it won't do a lot of good to take the air in from a cool spot, if the supercharger itself is immersed in hot air - so, i have been working on isolating it from hot air, and reducing the overall underhood temps - heat soak from things like the radiator and exhaust would raise the supercharger temps to much higher levels than desired - add in the compression temp increase from boost, and the intake temps could easily soar over 200 degrees - not good
when i checked this before i did any of my work, when i was developing the exhaust heat shield, it was about 68 degrees outside, and clear weather - the underhood temps near the intake manifold on stock layout were nearly 200 degrees after sitting in traffic and about 180 at freeway speeds, pushing to over 350 near the exhaust, and near radiator temp anywhere near the radiator
then i decided to check the new stuff - it was about 62 degrees outside, sunny, and not a cloud in the sky - i got the car good and warmed up before i did any of this - oil temps were near 200 and water temps were about 175 (that's as warm as my car runs)
i placed the sensor above the intake manifold - this read about 80-85 degrees at freeway speed, and would go as high as 140 sitting stuck in traffic for 20 minutes like i was - this was an amazing nearly 40 degree improvement sitting still to almost 100 degree improvement when moving
then i placed the sensor in the area between the front engine bay plastic cover and the engine bay, over on the driver side, to see what the temps were in that area - i expected heat soak from the radiator, but due to the new parts, they were amazingly close to the intake point - i only picked up 2 degrees - that was about a 100 degree change
then i placed the temp sensor at the intake, just to see what temp that was - i was surprised to see that it was reading almost 5 degrees BELOW ambient at freeway speeds - it would react fairly quickly to speed changes, and come back to ambient when i stopped, so it was accurate, but i didn't expect wind chill on a temp sensor
between the oil cooling system the Rotrex already comes with, and the additional heat controlling parts, as well as a few more we have in mind, we expect the intake temps to be VERY low for such a system, and likely only about 50 degrees above ambient - this pushes its efficiency up and allows for more boost without creating detonation problems and such - we still aren't looking to increase boost, but this certainly goes a long way toward making it safe
also, we are tuning on 91 octane, to be able to run in areas where higher octane fuel is not available - anywhere you have higher octane fuel, you will have even more safety margin
obviously i'll do more testing and provide more data, but so far it looks like everything is coming together nicely - all the little items like this will make for a very complete kit that will provide repeatable and dependable results
nothing is hard to install either