water/meth injection

[ericjon262]

I could see how moving the crossmember complicates things. What does your intercooler look like? Would tilting it help?

It’s not the most elegant solution, but some of this:

https://www.jegs.com/i/JEGS/555/15101/10002/-1

Along with compression elbows and other fittings from the hardware store might help with working out the water lines

Function almost always overrides form, this case is no different.

I actually have 2 intercoolers to choose from at the moment, one is a straight through parallel flow style, one has the in/out on the same side, and is a cross flow style, I'll snap some pictures later.

can you reverse your intake manifold and place the TB on the passenger side then use a log/barrel type AW intercooler where the cat would be and route charge pipe up to the passenger side.

See fieromadman's setup..

I actually did this in the past, the problem is that the charge piping an AC compressor begin to occupy the same space, and, it also requires me to cut up the decklid, which is something I will not flex on, this car will have a functional, hinged, decklid.

can you reverse your intake manifold and place the TB on the passenger side\

You could run a dizzy if you did this!

I could do alot of things, but, along with cutting the decklid, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell I'd run a dizzy on this engine...

How about putting your intercooler in the cavity ahead of the left rear wheelwell. Would you be able to fit it there? I assume that you would need flex hoses / rubber to accommodate the engine movement.

maybe, but I'm not sure I like that idea, mainly from a plumbing standpoint. I recently acquired something that lead me to explore another idea, but I'm not sure how viable it is yet. I'll update here in a bit.

[ericjon262]

some of you may have seen my post in Will's thread that I bought one of the N* blowers, honestly, I only bought it because where else where you find a 122 ci blower with an intercooler for less than $1000? I figured $510 meant one day if I consider myself enough of a masochist to own two fieros with crappy engines, may was well make one a blown N*

looking at the blower and intercooler got me thinking, why not pick up a intercooler from a supercharged GM application? it wouldn't be dificult to adapt a "lid" from an LSA, or LC3

Here's a picture of the LC3 (N*) intercooler disassembled. it uses Lamnivo cores, which are supposedly one of the best charge cooler you can get. you can see, looking at the underside that it could be more or less bolted to a flat adapter plate, and completely eliminate 85% of the charge piping. which should improve response, and probably fit under a stock decklid.



here's a shot of an LSA intercooler. I'm not really on board with the LSA parts though, they have a fairly high failure rate, and for the price of the intercooler brick I can get a whole assembled LC3 blower.



the main disadvantage I see to a "lid" intercooler like this, would be that the intercooler is bolted to a hot engine, which could lead to heat soak.

According to laminova's website, you need about 2.5 mm of intercooler per hp. for the americans in the room, that means each inch of intercooler supports about 10 HP. the LC3 intercooler has aproximately 56" of intercooler! should be more than enough for my little heap!

I can see right off the bat that I would have to add a MAT sensor, as the IAT sensor in the MAF would no longer provide a viable signal to the ECU I think if I took this on, I would use water injection for the time being while I design a adapter, so that I can get the car on the road in a reasonable amount of time.

what are your thoughts?

[ericjon262]

I popped the intercooler off of the LC3 blower and set it on top of my LX9 intake to get an idea of if an adapter plate would be worth anything. I think it's definitely a doable idea, but it has a bunch of things that would make it less than ideal.

here's a shot of the removed intercooler's Laminova cores.



one of the things that makes the LC3 intercooler less than ideal, is the port offsets. I suspect the banks on a N* are offset to a much smaller degree compared to a 60V6 based on how much the shape of the intercooler and intake don't match.



overall, the width difference outside to outside isn't very much, although I didn't actually measure it. The other issue that arrises, is that the notches on the outside of the blower/intercooler for the injectors, end up in the ports of the 60V6. the adapter plate could remedy this, but it wouldn't necessarily be ideal by any stretch.

The LSA intercooler lid doesn't have the same notches, and may be a more viable option. As expeted, the lid is larger than the 60V6 LIM by about 2" in all directions, which I could argue is OK in this case because it would make the fabrication of an adapter much easier.





I also revisited an option I had thought of a few years ago, but never executed. The parallel flow intercooler could be mounted in between the runners, and a plenum/runner setup to direct it to the ports. This setup would clear the decklid, but I imagine the bends around the outlet of the intercooler to the ports would be less than ideal for performance.



Here's a picture of the cross flow intercooler I have



The other option I see, is to fabricate a custom intercooler. Laminova cores are available, and a design could be drawn up in CAD fairly easily, but having the parts machined sounds pretty pricey. it could also be done with conventional cores, but then the fabrication aspect begins to get very involved, with weld failure potentially being catastrophic to the entire engine. an adapter to use the LSA intercooler seems to be the best option at the moment. it could be made to bolt on with one adapter plate, and the parts are available, but I'm not comfortable enough with the idea yet to drop $500+ on just the lid/intercooler

[Shaun41178(2)]

An intercooler with the in/out on the same side should fit in the cat location area and clear the manifold I would think

[ericjon262]

An intercooler with the in/out on the same side should fit in the cat location area and clear the manifold I would think

I feel like a broken record...

so, in a perfect world, I would have that room available. at some point in time I thought it was a good idea to cut out the stock front cradle crossmember and install a 2x3 box beam further forward in it's place, so I don't have the same space available. I have been looking at modifying the beam to provide clearance forward of the transmission for the intercooler, but the modifications would be pretty extensive, and I'm not sure I want to cut a crossmember at the front transmission mount to add an intercooler, the idea hasn't been removed from the list yet though...

The turbo interferes with the decklid grill install, and the crossmember interferes with the cat converter location. to mount the IC I'll probably have to cut/clearance.

Turbo is nowhere near hitting the vent, but you can see the air intake to the turbo will be occupying the space under the vent. The crossmember is moved forward, closer to the firewall by 4-6", which make for a very narrow gap for the IC to squeeze.

[Shaun41178(2)]

So you haven't test fit it yet?

[Honest Don]

Mine looks similar to the one on the bottom.

[ericjon262]

So you haven't test fit it yet?

I have, or else I wouldn't say it didn't work...

[ericjon262]

I've been playing around in OnShape and mapping out the available combinations to install Lamniova cores into the intake WITHOUT cutting the decklid. I've tried 4, 5, and 6 core arrangements, and I don't think more than 4 standard length cores will fit without cutting the decklid OR packaging in a way that one or more cores becomes effectively useless. 1.5" schedule 80 pipe is very close to the required ID to install the cores, a short turn on a lathe, and they would fit like a glove, then all you need is to machine 15mm slots and end caps. if I were to fabricate my own, I think this would be the easiest, and probably the most cost effective solution.

[draven]

I've been playing around in OnShape and mapping out the available combinations to install Lamniova cores into the intake WITHOUT cutting the decklid. I've tried 4, 5, and 6 core arrangements, and I don't think more than 4 standard length cores will fit without cutting the decklid OR packaging in a way that one or more cores becomes effectively useless. 1.5" schedule 80 pipe is very close to the required ID to install the cores, a short turn on a lathe, and they would fit like a glove, then all you need is to machine 15mm slots and end caps. if I were to fabricate my own, I think this would be the easiest, and probably the most cost effective solution.

I think this would be interesting to try. Do you have any pics of the inside of your intake manifold? Is your intake manifold a single piece or does it consist of an upper and lower? If it has and UIM and LIM maybe fab a sandwich plate?

[The Dark Side of Will]

So you haven't test fit it yet?

What that bit about the crossmember means is that he welded a piece of 2x3 or so rectangular tubing across the cradle where the stock cat was, in order to replace the Fiero's original cradle crossmember.

[ericjon262]

I think this would be interesting to try. Do you have any pics of the inside of your intake manifold? Is your intake manifold a single piece or does it consist of an upper and lower? If it has and UIM and LIM maybe fab a sandwich plate?

"In the intake" wasn't very good phrasing, I meant in a custom intake, I don't think two cores could be fit to the stock 3500 intake without an extreme amount of fabrication.

[ericjon262]

well, I acquired four of these the other day...



now I just need to develop the most compact method to build an intake around them, and not fry my throttle body's motor... lol!

ideally, coolant will flow down two, and up the other two, to ensure uniform charge temperatures, additionally, I need to install a MAT sensor to provide indication of outlet temperature to the MS3. I can use the IAT sensor in the MAF to determine the effectiveness of the intercooler as well.

[ericjon262]

here's where I'm at so far, the four sets of concentric circles represent the pipe that will be used to house the Laminova cores. the high horizontal line represents the botttom of the decklid, and the boxes under the tubes represent the fuel rails and lower intake manifold interference points. I used large boxes instead of contours approximating the fuel rails and bypass line to ensure that I have ample clearance. the dashed lines represent the entry/exit on the cores. the two vertical lines are an approximation of the outside edge of the lower intake flange.



This pipe is almost the exact size needed to build the core housings, the ID will need to be enlarged slightly, but shouldn't be much of a problem, any full scale machine shop should be able to do it with a boring bar.

https://www.onlinemetals.com/en/buy/alu ... d/pid/1230

The hard parts of making this work will be fabricating the enclosure, to include the TB flange, and plumbing. The part the makes the plumbing difficult, is that any way this is assembled will result in the cores being the highest point in the system, so any the system will have to be a non vented, with a sealed expansion volume. High point vents on the cores, and an air trap on the inlet of the pump is probably the best I would be able to do to alleviate air binding.

[ericjon262]

depending on how I work this, there is potential to siamese the pipe, and then have the upper and lower most portions machined flat, this would help maximize hood clearance, without having the plenum behind the throttle obstructed like a fiero intake. the configuration on the right has about 7.5mm of clearance to the decklid, I would prefer to increase the clearance to at least about 10 mm, but I'm not sure that will be an achievable goal yet.

[Shaun41178(2)]

Watch this

https://youtu.be/eUv_TYT-E-E

[ericjon262]

Already have, if i do water meth, it most likely won't be in through the throttle body/central point. This thread has really become more centered on the construction of a compact A2W intercooler now though.

[pmbrunelle]

I can see right off the bat that I would have to add a MAT sensor, as the IAT sensor in the MAF would no longer provide a viable signal to the ECU I think if I took this on, I would use water injection for the time being while I design a adapter, so that I can get the car on the road in a reasonable amount of time.

Air temperature is used in speed-density to correct for the air density variation with temperature. If you're using a MAF, you don't really need an air temperature sensor anymore, as you're taking a direct mass flow measurement.

Be careful with air temperature sensors placed after a turbocompressor. When gas is compressed, its temperature rises (immediately). This means that at the moment we hit full boost, the compressor discharge air is hot right away! When you shift and you're no longer boosting, the discharge temp goes right back down.

If you're running speed-density, this means that your temperature sensor must be fast enough to react to the temperature swings. If your sensor doesn't react fast enough, the speed-density algorithm is working off the wrong data.

I tested my open-element sensor by dunking it into a pot of boiling water. It took seconds for its resistance to stabilise after the dunk. I have about 0.3 seconds of turbo lag between WOT and full boost. So forget it, a post-compressor sensor would never keep up.

On my Fiero (which is running speed-density), I placed the temperature sensor in the intake duct just behind the intake scoop. It's basically reading the ambient air temperature. The air density reduction due to the temperature rise of the compressor ends up being baked into my VE(RPM, MAP) table. It seems to work well enough, but I usually hang around the same altitude (which happens to be near sea level). I think if I drove my car to a different altitude, the compressor would be working at a different pressure ratio for a given MAP, so the mass flow estimation would be off.

With an intercooler, temperature estimation gets complicated (since the sensors are slow), so MAF starts to sound like a good idea...

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Some comments on the video

The dude missed the point of the water/meth injection. Water/meth isn't a power adder on its own. What it can do is stave off detonation, which allows you to run more boost without detonation.

The video shows an air temperature reduction (in the compressed air piping) with the water/meth, as cool as with the intercooler... I'd call BS on that result. If the air temperature was the same as with the intercooler, the air density would be the same, and then the power would be the same.

However, power on water/meth was the same as with the non-intercooled non-injected configuration, so I reason that the air density (and thus temperature) was the same as with the non-intercooled non-injected configuration.

My bet is that the water/meth droplets were hitting the temperature sensor and cooling it, giving a false temperature reading!

I think that if you can package an intercooler, it's a good thing to have. However, depending on its own temperature, it may not always cool the compressed air the same amount, which introduces another variable that can lead to inconsistency with the tune. However, if you have a MAF, the tune problem is largely solved.

The MAF is just a bit more tricky in that you have to install the MAF itself, and you have to recirculate your BOV flow. So it's more fabrication / packaging work.

[The Dark Side of Will]

Air temperature is used in speed-density to correct for the air density variation with temperature. If you're using a MAF, you don't really need an air temperature sensor anymore, as you're taking a direct mass flow measurement.

Intake air temp has to be baked into the MAF reading. Without this compensation, a hot wire/hot film MAF would read differently between 10 lb/min at 30F and 10 lb/min at 90F. GM's MAF + MAP controls help differentiate this, as does IAT directly.

I don't know much about Von Karman frequency MAF or flapper-style AFMs in this regard though.

GM's decision to relate MAF to frequency vs. Bosch's decision to use 0-5V definitely gave the GM sensors at least one and maybe two significant digits of precision, though.

[pmbrunelle]

Intake air temp has to be baked into the MAF reading. Without this compensation, a hot wire/hot film MAF would read differently between 10 lb/min at 30F and 10 lb/min at 90F. GM's MAF + MAP controls help differentiate this, as does IAT directly.

When I think of a MAF, I imagine a black box that returns the mass air flow. Whatever internal mechanisms it may use are abstracted away from the user.

If a sensor returns a raw value that must be combined with another variable (temperature) to obtain mass airflow, then it's not a MAF.

GM's decision to relate MAF to frequency vs. Bosch's decision to use 0-5V definitely gave the GM sensors at least one and maybe two significant digits of precision, though.

The input capture unit of a typical microcontroller is 16-bit. (for frequency measurement)

The ADC of a typical microcontroller is typically 12-bit. (for analog voltage measurement)