Custom Ram Intake Think Tank

[ajinvista]

I agree. With the speeds our tuner cars are getting, ram air induction is basically a non issue. I put the intake scoop on my hood to funnel cooler fresh air to the filter without really even a thought about getting more HP. I watched a little blip on the Suzuki 'Busa and they said it does add about 10 hp to the bike at the top end but that's when the bike is travelling at more than 180mph. I'm also thinking my scoop will hurt a little in the drag coefficient area. Does anyone think I should get hood pins for that point at which I do hit 180+ mph in my stock bodied DSM?
I hope your laughing too. :>}

 

[focusedrage]

i wouldent knock it, there is no reason why a dsm shouldnt go 180, with the right gearing and hp

 

[Nitro413]

Wish i had smarter friend to prove my theories wrong....they are usually like...wow, good idea. But anyway, I can say that ram air will really not help at all. Doing the setup will get you cold air though.

Using the funnel and water example someone did above. If you have a a 1000 gallon container, and you life it up in the air somehow, and put a spout at the very bottom that is 2 inches in diameter, and we will say that the bottom of the container is like a sink and angles toward the center. If you put a gallon of water into the contrainer, we'll say it will take about 20 seconds to empty out (not realistic, just for example). If you put 10 gallons in, it will take about 195 seconds to empty. The weight of the water will push it out slightly faster. If you filled the entire container, and put 1000 gallons of water into it, it would take damn close to 20,000 seconds to empty out. Just the weight of the water is not going to affect how it flows out of the 2 inch valve. If you wanted to make it come out really fast, you would need to seal the container and compress the water by adding gas, and then heat it up to get those molecules movin real fast.....then when you opened the valve at the bottom....well you probably wouldn't want to be anywhere near that valve. Lets relate this to ram air now.

Lets say you exend your intake pipe to the front of you grill and put a funnel on the end (lets pretend we don't need a filter). When you not moving, the turbo is sucking. When you ge going 50mph, that will be like the first gallon of water in the container.....the air will be pushed into the turbo....but at this point, the turbo is sucking more then the air is pushing, so it's not much of a difference. So you get going 100 miles per hour, at lets say, somehow, your car is at 2000 rpms. So the turbo isn't sucking in too much air anymore, most of it is being pushed into the funnel to it. Will that give you more power? Probably not, but it might make the turbo spool a little faster. Each turbo pushed out a certain amount of air...for the most part, it is always going to be the same no matter what. So if the turbo pushes the same amount of air to the engine, the power will be the same. The only way the turbo will push more air out is if you can push more air into the turbo then the turbo can push out. Basically, if your turbo is pushing out 20psi of pressure, you need to push over 20psi of pressure into it through the intake to get it to flow higher then that. That is not physically possible on a car, even if you could go 1000 miles per hour, it wouldnt push more. Just like 1000 gallons of water will not push more water out of the valve.

So you would have to compress air and then force it into the turbo to push 20psi; essentially, thats what a turbo does, it compresses air and then forces it into the engine. So lets say you compressed air and pusdhed it into the turbo...the turbo is making alot more then 20psi, so anything extra you push into it will go through the compressor housing and out the wastegate. If you stuck a fan on your intake and blew air into your engine, nothing would happen in terms of power increase. If anything, your engine would suck more air then the fan could blow and rip the fan apart.

All in all, a ram air intake will increase spool time of the turbo in higher gears. At lower gears, you will not be going fast enough to notice a difference. I guess you would need to test it to find out, but i don't think it would even be a noticable difference....the turbo is always going to be sucking more air then a ram air can push...so it's still a vacuum.

If you were coasting at 90 miles an hour in neutral, the ram air would be pushing air into the turbo, and then it when you hit the gas, i suppose the turbo would then spool faster. But that really is the only time it will work, and that will never ever help you. Who coasts when they are racing?

 

[LaserRST]

I was pondering the same issue... ram air does slow down high velocity air to make air more available.... a free flowing intake. What if you built a front facing cold air intake, about 4-5in tube, with a nice HKS high flow filter. This would help reduce the pressure loss between the filter and the turbo, theoretically. It would also, by sheer volume, produce less "draw" from the filter itself. Resulting in a true cold air with the benefits of "ram air". Just a thought.

 

[Turbonium]

when u shift.........the turbo will stop sucking as much.....could it help spoolup inbetween high speed shifts?? just a Q o well laters
Ryan

 

[Nitro413]

Yeah I was saying the same thing with puting it in neutral....but I have an A/T. It would be the same when you shift though.

 

[greyforestgst]

air is incompressible until mach 0.5?

wacky i never knew that. wonder how my hand waving back and forth can create sound; its not moving mach 0.5

 

[Nitro413]

You are pushing air around, not compressing it when you wave your hand. You don't have to be going mach .5 to compress air either...if you have a sealed container, compression is simple.

 

[greyforestgst]

Originally posted by Nitro413
You are pushing air around, not compressing it when you wave your hand. You don't have to be going mach .5 to compress air either...if you have a sealed container, compression is simple.

sound is waves of pockets of compressed and decompressed air

 

[Nitro413]

To compress air, you need to have a sealed enclosure. The sounds comes from faster moving air particles. You cannot compress air by moving your hand; the air particles hit your hand, your hand pushes them, and because it is an open environment, the particles just move around your hand and you get noise from them moving.

 

[focusedrage]

hmm, along the same lines, it has always been a big debate over weather or not the crack of a whip comes from the tip breaking the sound barier.... which could make sense

 

[Nitro413]

Originally posted by focusedrage
hmm, along the same lines, it has always been a big debate over weather or not the crack of a whip comes from the tip breaking the sound barier.... which could make sense

Now that could be considered a "roll theory" focusedrage

 

[focusedrage]

how so

 

[Nitro413]

obviously not becuse of the same exact principles (combustion), but how the whip starts out slow and rapidly increases speed as energy moved from one end of the whip to the other. The whip is made thick at the handle and very thin to a point at the tip....so energy increases as it moves down the whip (your hand moving the whip down really fast) so by the time it gets to the end, there is a bunch of energy going into a really small tip. THe tip flips up almost two times the speed of sound.

 

[greyforestgst]

Originally posted by Nitro413
To compress air, you need to have a sealed enclosure. The sounds comes from faster moving air particles. You cannot compress air by moving your hand; the air particles hit your hand, your hand pushes them, and because it is an open environment, the particles just move around your hand and you get noise from them moving.

no, sound is waves of pockets of compressed and decompressed air

 

[Nitro413]

"An object produces sound when it vibrates in air (sound can also travel through liquids and solids, but air is the transmission medium when we listen to speakers). When something vibrates, it moves the air particles around it. Those air particles in turn move the air particles around them, carrying the pulse of the vibration through the air as a traveling disturbance."

Sound waves are vibrations. The vibrations move the air particles, which make them closer or further apart...that's the "compression" and "decompression" you are talking about. Compressed air in a turbo is not the same thing. If you made a sealed room and dropped the air pressure, it wouldn't make a sound just because the air pressure changed.

 

[focusedrage]

wow, so a whip does move that fast... this is somethign my good friend thinks otherwise

 

[Defiant]

woof.

Sorry, that was my brain imploding.

Some of you guys are spending too much time in school. I'm still with post 38.

 

[Nitro413]

Well your're right, we're just explaining it.

 

[ItsStockOfficer]

Ram air most definitley does work. All you guys are assuming that you have 14.7 psi at the turbo inlet and you are trying to increase the air pressure beyond that point. While that is impossible, its not the case.

In reality your lucky to have 13 psi at the turbo inlet and ram air has the potential to help you maintain 14.7 psi(you still won't though). Thats a huge increase. Ram air, regardless of whether its compressing air can still yield gains of a PSI or more in pressure increase at the turbo inlet.

 

[Nitro413]

If i am understanding ItsStockOfficer correctly, then he is right. Don't know why i didn't think of this before. But, just to prove it, I did an experiment. I put one house fan on high power--this would be the turbo wheel---, and took note of the speed of the air coming out of it. Then i put another fan...same model....behind it on medium power--this would be the ram air--and then felt the air speed coming from the first fan again....it was more powerful. So ram air will help spool time on turbo cars....that extra psi that its making will just vent out the wastegate and not get to the engine. On a N/A car, ram air will increase airflow to the engine.

 

[Defiant]

ooo, I don't know if a 1750rpm house fan will much compare to a 30,000+ rpm turbo.

 

[Nitro413]

Same concepts, just at a much lower level. Like the damage a penny can do when dropped from 10,000 feet in the air compared to what a bowling ball can do.

 

[maskednegator]

Originally posted by Nitro413
Same concepts, just at a much lower level. Like the damage a penny can do when dropped from 10,000 feet in the air compared to what a bowling ball can do.

the answer is no. your analogy is totally irrelevant and you get no props.

 

[Nitro413]

why am i wrong? get a road cone and stick your mouth over the small end and breath through it. now get in your friends car, have him drive 10mph, put the road cone to your mouth again, stick your head out the window, and now breath through the cone.....it will be easier. have your friend get going 40mph and you'll be getting more air pumped into you mouth then you can handle.

a turbo sucks air, and a ram air intake will make it easier to do that, and it will be much colder then air from under the hood. it terms of power gains...well you won't get shit from the "ram air" effect, but the colder air will help obviously. adding to what Defiant was saying, if your turbo is spinning at 30,000 rpms, 30,400 rpms from the intake will not be a noticable gain in anything. Thats just over a 1% increase.