EFI FUEL COOLING & HP? DOES ICE-COLD FUEL ACTUALLY ADD POWER TO YOUR FUEL-INJECTED MOTOR? DYNO TEST
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- čas přidán 17. 07. 2022
- HOW MUCH POWER DOES COOLING YOUR FUEL ADD? WE KNOW THAT A COOLER CHARGE TEMP ADDS POWER, BUT DOES COOLING YOUR FUEL ALSO COOL THE CHARGE TEMP? DOES AN EFI MOTOR BENEFIT FROM COLD FUEL? CHECK OUT THIS VIDEO WHERE I RAN A MODIFIED, FUEL-INJECTED 5.0L 302 WITH HOTTER AND COLDER FUEL. USING A OIL COOLER AND ICE WATER, I WAS BALE TO DRAMATICALLY LOWER THE TEMPERATURE OF THE FUEL THROUGH THE MOTOR. THE QUESTION IS, DID IT MAKE ANY EXTRA POWER?
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You should revisit this for a high compression engine and see if cooling the fuel can let you run lower octane gas without having to back off timing.
That big plenum is kinda heating back up
It wont
@@BuzzLOLOL duh lol you are correct sir. I need to stop commenting after midnight lol.
@@BuzzLOLOL actually on some engines they do. Older Chevrolets used a throttle body on top of the intake that was basically just a 4 barrel carb with injectors. And some diesels and cars have a non indirect injection.
@@BuzzLOLOL look up ford 6.9 and 7.3 idi they were old school diesel engines. And im pretty sure a couple of cat engines were the same way but im not 100% sure
maybe redo the test with a throttle body injection rather then port injection, that way the fuel is in contact with the air longer so you get more actual air charge cooling?
Or stack
by the time it's in the cylinder and compressing that's negated.
@@lasskinn474 no its not, which is why a carburetor on the exact same setup makes a little more power then a port injection, you get air charge cooling. look through all of Richards videos he has dont the carb vs FI and the FI makes a little more torque (probably because of a tighter AF/R) but the carb makes more power due to the air cooling
@@DBLDREW yeah my bad on naturally aspirated on that, if you could get the air cooled a bit you could indeed get more air mass into the cylinder.
I doubt the 50f difference does much anything compared to the energy of it vaporizing though
@@DBLDREW where are the videos showing a carb makes more power? I dont remember seeing any on this channel. I do however remember seeing efi make more power on the LS setup.
On a boosted Engine with very good intercooling and with the fuel injectors very close to the intake valve it can actually help to slightly heat the fuel to improve vaporization. Improved vaporization will help prevent detonation while increasing power.
Many years ago Ferrari used special fuel for qualifying in Formula 1 versus what they would run during the race. The qualifying fuel was supplied by Shell that contained isopentene and cyclopentane. It would vaporize very fast because it was a light molecule and they could run higher boost because it had very good octane. They couldn't run the qualifying fuel during the race because there wasn't enough BTUs per specific volume and they were limited by fuel tank size.
Thinking of this also, as turbo engines use extra fuel to cool down the intake charge. F150 EcoBoost has terrible mpg while towing. Which Porsche did an interesting intake to try and solve this.
Latent heat of vaporization is why Ethanol cools the intake charge, which works with the added O2 in the fuel to make more power, when you drop the intake temp by the fuel vaporizing it makes a denser charge. Cooling the fuel makes it harder to vaporize the fuel, even in a relative vacuum in the intake port/manifold. Boiling point goes up with more pressure, down with less pressure, so you are exacerbating the problem with cooling the fuel with a lower pressure in the intake.
Gasoline needs between 80F and 450F to vaporize the component chemicals in it. Obviously some of it never vaporizes fully, which is why it wastes so much energy as heat that we have to get rid of with the radiator and exhaust. Cooling it means it takes longer for it to vaporize, and more heat in the intake. It should help with ping/knock and vapor lock like Dave and the Steve's found on EM, and cool the charge slightly just because its cold, but its when a liquid vaporizes that it pulls the heat out of the air around it.
Already know what happens if you run E85 cold like gasoline. You use more of it. The power stays about the same, but you get worse mileage. If you run an alcohol engine, be it ethanol or methanol too cold, like with a 160F or no thermostat, you are going to milk the oil on the street due to condensation building up in the crankcase. It doesn't like to vaporize when its cold, which is why it doesn't like to start when the air and engine are around 20F. Trust me, I run into that here in Michigan, but you wont in SoCal. Below 40F I have to get creative starting one of my E85 Pontiacs with a carb. EFI starts a bit better, but it takes considerably longer than when its hot.
Ethanol plays different than gasoline, it takes another thought process entirely to get the most out of it. It actually likes the heat in the intake, heads, ports, air, and fuel. Because all of that makes it vaporize more readily. Now its not going to make a big power increase running everything hot like that, but it will use less fuel.
You probably won't see a difference in power going from 48F fuel to 200F fuel running E98/E100, you probably won't see a bfsc change either... but.. in a street driven vehicle, you will pick up mileage and keep the power. There is more to it than bfsc, tq, and hp. Lots of variables at play in a running vehicle that are simply not present on a dyno, but you already know that. Move the injectors farther upstream and heat the ethanol before it gets to the rails, but after the return so you're not sending heated fuel back to the tank, and it has more time to vaporize.
This is what I have been working on in an effort to get better mileage on ethanol, along with building my engines with as much compression as I can put in them... which precludes running pump gas. The power ends up where it ends up, but with 13:1 compression in 455s with nearly double the CFM of a stock head, they make some power. Man do they ever drive nice too.
I need to try that on my E85 Honda. I dont have much compression 9.3 but I can heat the fuel up.
very interesting. do you know where i could get some pontiac factory iron heads ported? thank you.
@@johnbecay6887 Dave Bischop at SF Performance in Canada, Kaufman Racing in Ohio, Butler doesn't do many iron heads anymore, tears up the CNC machines too much for them.
@@SweatyFatGuy thank you. i know Butler had stopped porting iron heads. i will check out the other 2... thank you., take care, john
My 94 s10 is running straight up E85 ! 2.2 l ! with the vortex cyl heads the cooling effect of E85 is pretty remarkable ! note : this is a 640,000 mile vehicle and no harm to any component done ! + i saved $ 18 on my last fuel up
scotty moondog jakubin interesting. i have a 98 S 10. how did you increase the volume of fuel required by running E-85? thanks, john
I wasn't expecting a big difference since you're using EFI, it's a dry intake. Cool fuel works with a carb and wet intake setup and I believe that is what Steve and David found.
Yea I recon he would see more of a change on wet manifold stuff
How to find the video by steve and David?
@@christophermackin147 I think it was titled "Does Fuel Cooling Matter" and was an episode on Engine Masters. I watched it on Motortrend, not sure if it's on youtube, I've never tried searching for it. Hope that helps. Edit: The episode is season 7 and show 113 called "Does Fuel Temperature Matter"
@@firebirdjone really appreciate you pointing me in the right direction. On a side note I love the Firebirdjone handle. My first car was a 69 firebird. Picked it up for 2000 back in 1992!
@@christophermackin147 Cool, thanks for the kind words.
I believe what we are seeing here is that the latent heat of vaporization has more of an impact than the temperature of the fuel itself. Good content!
I totally agree here. I think carburetors benefit from a secondary 'sheering' effect in regards to fuel vaporization due to the boosters. I believe tall long runner/cooler intakes like annular boosters?. Hence, more cold = need more atomization. Everything equal: I would think cold fuel would just make the droplets in the mix larger? Requiring even more sheer which an injector nozzle doesn't deliver like a carb. Same gravy. Just now with lumps...
I think the AIR needs to be cooled. Liquid is a set volume 40 degrees or 120 degrees. Air can compress, which means more oxygen in the same volume. I think if you put the injectors up high where it has time to cool the air you'll get a power gain.
if you are gonna ignite the fuel wouldnt cooling it be harder to get it to the flash point?
Bringing us content we dint no we needed
Thanks Richard!
This was fun and informative Richard! Thanks for being willing to test out our crazy ideas. For sh*ts and giggles, you could go totally crazy with this by cooling the fuel way WAY down by using antifreeze and dry ice instead of water/ice in your cooling bucket. I don't think it would make any more power, but what do I know? That's why we test!
Awesome work. I thought exactly the same as you and expected a noticeable change. Thanks man!
I like these tests, because it always brings up more questions than answers. But I agree that doing it with carburetors would yield more change.
I recall reading a book by Lingenfelter (maybe it was Banks) that mentioned how cooling fuel is counter-intuitive. You are expending energy within the cylinder to warm the fuel up to the vapor/burn temp which ultimately is wasted energy. Essentially, you want cooler air and warmer fuel. The caveat to this is how the fuel is injected; I would agree you would see various results depending on whether it is GDI, Port, Throttle Body, or Carb.
I think you'd see a significant increase in power if you were using throttle body injection or carburetor. You'd essentially be cooling the air charge with the cold fuel, as opposed to the port fuel injection, which doesn't have enough time to cool the air.
Definitely do a centrifugal supercharger to see if charge cooling is significant! Also, just because it popped into my head, make sure the oil cooler isn't a restriction or somehow dropping pressure! Also check AFRs, they may make the same power but one could be richer/leaner. I've learned so much from your videos, you're a huge reason I have a 6.0 and 4L80 in my '87 Silverado!
Excellent video. Definitely giving me plenty to think about. I think something like this would probably work out really well on like a carbureted engine with high compression and see if you can run a lower octane fuel
Great channel bro, a real scientist over here 👏 👍🏾 🙌 💪 👌
thnx
years ago i did a similar test on a carbureted street-strip car using a cool can. with cold gas i could discern a small improvement at the strip--a few hundreds of a second. in the interest of science--and my warped curiosity-- i lowered the fuel temp until i had frost on the float bowl. at that point the car slowed down, i believe because the fuel was not atomizing as well at those temps. the cool can works for a dedicated race car looking for every last hp. for a street-strip car the extra complication, clutter and inconvenience was not worth it. plus, unless there is ice in the can, the cool can will heat the fuel.
Vaporisation (liquid to gas phase change) is what takes a lot of heat input. Not so much for just heating up the liquid to vaporisation temperature. So get that fuel atomised as fine as you can and injected further away from intake valves to allow time for phase change. Then results will follow...to some extent at least!
yes.
but for results I don't think it'll make any difference higher up, because the phase change is what takes way more energy than the 50 degree difference.
I'd definitely want to see it on a forced-induction engine, but you'd probably want to configure it for a full return setup. The carb version likely made power since it stayed cool from all that thermal mass. The fuel rails have much more surface area to absorb heat.
Also the music was throwing me thru a loop til I realized it was "chill" music for a chilled-fuel topic. lol
Thanks for the video. I was wondering about this a few days ago. Please do one on carburetors.
Absolutely makes sense that it could improve power. But more so if wellnatomized fuel was mixed before going through the intake.
I would have been surprised to see any significant difference. The thermal mass of the fuel is very little compared to it's latent heat.
and if it vaporizes that takes way more energy than the energy in the temperature difference anyhow.
The thing is,my 79 scout 2 had a dry ice can on it. I noticed a difference when the engine hit 210-230* temps the power didn’t drop off like a hot engine does. So even if your 4x4 is overheating in the mud, you still have the power of a cooler running engine to get you out of the mud hole you’re battling. So that’s where this test needs to happen. Like a hot running 671 blower to put more timing in to it.
This is an interesting test. I added a fuel cooler like 2 years ago. i was running an external fuel pump on my return style system and my exhaust was close to the pump and tank. I was getting a condition where the car would warm up to temp and started having fueling issues that caused it to stall. I thought it was due to heat soak of the fuel returning to the tank after leaving the engine, but it had more to do with how the fuel system was wired.
You got what I expected for hp gains in a port fuel injected application. In a carbureted application the pressure drop across the carb has an additional temp change caused by the pressure drop across the carb. The lower fuel temps would merely add to this temp change causing a greater charge cooling effect on the fuel/air mixture resulting in higher hp gains. On the port fuel injection systems the location of the injector negates any additional effects cooler fuel will have on the charge temperature. It would be interesting to see if changing injector location would have any effect. I suspect it won’t have much of an effect.
Yes sir I think you should do the force induction test.
very knowledge worthy thank you for helping us..
I read an article years ago about Smokey Unick where he heated up the fuel to 212° and used a turbo charger , not for boost , but to atomize the fuel and got quite a bit of increase in performance and mileage.
THE NOT FOR BOOST PART IS IN QUESTION
@@richardholdener1727 I agree. He wasn't known for being completely honest. None of the racers who won a lot were.
Richard you made a really interesting video here. I think you could look at it from a different perspective - how much power can you squeeze from low quality gas? What say I lived in a place where only low octane fuel is available? Does cooled fuel allow me to run a higher compression/higher boost/advanced timing for a given octane rating?
I'd love to see you also revisit the water injection with the same perspective because your video on that showed that we lose power by adding water-only injection. What about the gains that can be made by the raised "effective" octane now that it's water injected? In that video you ran the same fuel, but didn't push the new limits of the fuel "octane" after water injection. IE, higher boost etc
BUT good work I love your efforts!
Richard, you just solved a whole mess of problems I have with a certain project in the works.. all within the first 20 seconds of video. Why didn't I think of that?
awesome test!!! would definitely like to see this test on a boosted setup
I believe it'd benefit the supercharged blow through carb or fuel injection the best. It'd give the fuel enough time to make a difference on cooling as well as a measurable effect on high pressured air.
Seems like as you super cool fuel, the molecules contract and therefore, you should be able to get a denser fuel charge in the combustion chamber. I would like to see a wintertime outdoors dyno. Cold air and fuel, vs a warm indoors dyno test
The vast majority of the charge cooling you get from fuel is from the latent heat of vaporization of the fuel, not the heat capacity in liquid form. Gasoline liquid has a heat capacity of 0.53 BTU/lb-deg F, but a latent heat of vaporization of around 150 btu-lb. That means that your 48 degrees of extra cooling only bought you 25 BTU/lb, or in other words 17% more cooling of the charge air than you'd get from the vaporization of the fuel alone. The power improvements from icing down fuel and manifolds in carbureted applications probably comes chiefly from cooling the manifold and carburetor down, minimizing the air heating from those (normally) hot surfaces, by improving volumetric efficiency. Good and interesting test, thanks Richard!
The fuel needs distance to cool the air to make the air denser as you said, I believe the cold fuel that close to the combustion will give you more detonation resistants in the car and lessen hot spots in the combustion chamber… more boost (more timing if it will take it) or try one of those throttle body injection deals.
Droplet size is the key to increasing efficiency in charge cooling... Since the droplets are the same size, no change... however, moving the injectors up the manifold will give the fuel more time to evaporate, and remove heat from the air... conversely, if you could make the droplets smaller, increasing the surface area, you will start to see gains, all things being equal. This is the idea behind ultra high fuel system utilizing DI injectors in a port position... significant charge cooling can be achieved.
the phase change from liquid to vapor takes way more energy than the energy difference in these temperatures. or from solid to vapor in case of ice in a glass.
@@lasskinn474 "takes way more energy" - please explain.
Please try this on a carb set up. Thanks for the videos!!
I think the most important thing too takeaway is how fast fuel temperature increases in such a short amount of time.
You’d have to start thinking about super cooled fluids(liquid hydrogen cooled) and their interaction with none supercooled mater.
Everyone who loves engines should check out the late great Smokey Yunick's homogenizer engine. Smoky invented this concept quite a few years ago where he actually heated the air fuel mix instead of cooling it. He used a turbo as what he called a "homogenizer" to heat the air fuel mix, then heated it again. It was a strange system I don't fully understand, but it was pure genius how it worked. He used a Pontiac Fiero engine for his testing and managed to get twice as much horsepower out of it and some 50-60 mpg fuel economy. During testing Smokey mentioned that the test engine made too much power and he kept breaking the Fiero transaxles. Somehow that engine concept just disappeared. There is someone here in Florida who has a couple of these engines from Smokey's garage but I'm not sure anyone knows how to make them run right or if they even run at all. If this concept had taken off, we would be driving around 4 cylinder cars that can smoke the tires at will and get 50 to 60 mpg doing it. The oil companies probably paid Smokey to keep them off the market.
hot vapor engine
@@richardholdener1727 Smokey was way ahead of his time. Wish he were still here. I enjoy the content, keep up the great work!
Definitely do another test. If you can, test all power adders, I realize that may not be easy.
I had a crazy idea about this a while back- wrapping the injector rails with coiled copper line and running LN2 through them. That way the fuel is chilled right before it is injected and there’s no parasitic heat getting to it beforehand like on an inline cooler setup.
Liquid moving through his cooling setup may lose a few degrees from his temp probe to the tip of the injector at best. Cooling the fuel rail would honestly amount to a hill of beans compared to what he's doing if it even did anything at all. The setup he did most likely was the best way to have fuel in contact with the largest surface area possible. A bigger cooler wouldn't make a difference either, it would only matter if his temps had rose drastically during the pull, which it didn't.
Always wondered about this.
Looking forward for this test with a single port injection and boosted engines :)
Cooling the fuel can theoretically help, but at the temp differences you're looking at the change in heat of evaporation is small. Even going from 212 F down to 50 F is only going to increase the heat of evaporation of a gasoline fuel by about 10%. The real cooling effect is from evaporation itself and much less from the process of heating the fuel till it reaches evaporation temp in the intake tract. In contrast, the heat of evaporation of a pure ethanol fuel is about twice that of a gasoline fuel, so you're going to pull out much more heat switching to E85 than you could theoretically do by chilling gasoline in the temp ranges we'd expect on the road.
still a fun test
Would be cool to see if fuel temperature has bigger effect with outboard injector setup.
At least that will show if he improvements are due to heat energy absorption or fuel atomization, or is the heat energy absorption causing better atomization 😭👾😂😂
Tunnel Ram intake, with downdraft throttlebodies and the injectors at the top of the runners or even up in the plenum, also use a return type fuel system.
perhaps 16 smaller injectors rather than 8 big ones, will atomize the fuel better and faster too.
Absolutely try this with a boosted application
🔔😎
Very interesting. Thank you for doing this.
You ARE the engine master tester👍👍😎
Yes please do the test with blown app where there is no intercooler , these should show intake temp drop and then hp gain
Did this test on a turbo Mitsubishi on the dyno back in 2002-2003. Made about 12-16 awhp on that particular setup.
Hi Richard. I’d be curious to see this revisited on a blow through carb application
I agree, that it shall be done on high CR engine that is NA, and look at timing, normal, vs cold fuel and what may happen with the AFR, and yes with the fuel injectores further away from the port.
Thanks for sharing.
Please redo the test with higher delta T and boosted application.
I've used cool cans with carbs and had the Holley float bowls dripping with condensation and sometimes even what looked like frost. I've used dry ice in cool cans.
Bob Glidden Ran Pipe Insulation on All his Fuel Lines .Even Put Insulation Around His Intake !. Anything to Keep Heat away ! ! ! . . .
Ice water is OK, but you can only cool down to just above freezing. A big spiral of stainless tubing, in a bucket of just ice. With a way for the melt run off to drain. Now you have below freezing ice directly cooling the fuel. I deal with chilling liquids to as cold as possible on a daily basis. Straight ice is always colder than ice water
I think the cooling has more of an effect when you have an engine that is really pushed to its max. It doesn't as much add power as it allows you to push other things farther. Timing, compression, boost, etc.
Cold fuel doesn't react to anything like you're assuming, until you get to the extremes of it's boiling point. Compressing cold or hot fuel won't make any more power under boost or by adding compression ratio. It will never allow you to run more timing as it's combustion rate will be the same, cold or hot. I'm talking common sense, not factoring in crazy high compression like 20:1 or higher though.
The setup is just not Octane limited...
Test it on a high compression boosted engine running on the edge of the given fuel.
48* drop of fuel temp doesn't make power, but it will reduce knock if you are on the edge of the given fuels limit.
Turbojet aircraft engines often use a FOHE (Fuel-Oil heat exchanger) to cool the oil, and intentionally heat the fuel so it atomizes better in the combustion chambers. I understand there is not an easy and safe way to do this for car engines, but it would be a neat experiment.
Very cool test, Richard 🥶.
I fully expected your results to show some significant gains in power with the frosty fuel. Based on this test, I doubt that chilled fuel would make much difference on a boosted application either. Oxygen rich cold intake air along with cold fuel should be the way to go for decent power gains. Thanks for sharing your results. Now we know 🤔.
We use to do this with the trans cooler on all our derby cars as well as the oil cooler.
I think you should try it with a super charger.
Cooler air makes a huge difference! Could try running a fuel line into the upper intake then to the injectors to assist to cool the air.
That's a huge surprise. My old drag race buddy Jim Hand had a homemade cool can made out of a Coleman cooler and about 10 feet of 3/8's copper line. He swore it increased his quarter mile times by up to on tenth of a second. That's 10hp or so. But that was in the car, at the track so like you said, his fuel temps might have been 140 degrees plus, and it was also a carb vs F.I. I personally have never tested this but I do know a plate between the carb and intake that cools makes a little difference. Try a carb and try a turbo application.
it made a difference on carb combo
@@richardholdener1727 Now THIS is curious. I heard from an old hand that the IDEA of a cool can was that the cold fuel hit the hot bottom of the intake manifold and did a rapid explosive expansion, aiding atomization/evaporation. They used to run ice and water or dry ice and alcohol in the cool cans.
Could it be that the cold temperature reduced fuel evaporation/atomization enough to fight any benefit from slightly colder overall intake charge temps in your experiment?
If it worked on a carb, I would suggest cooling it to around minus 100 degrees, BUT, then you would have the problem of the carb booster venturi becoming a place where ice would form and clog up the intake and fuel metering accuracy.
@@richardholdener1727 Are you going to test this with a carburetor set up?
The EFI intake manifold has a lot of surface area, and had the engine been enclosed in sheetmetal to replicate an engine compartment, would hit over 200 degree temps. Since its a dry manifold, the fuel wouldn't cool it, but I think on these dynos you run 60 degrees on the inlet air, so in effect you're already accomplishing a cooling effect.
When you ride your car for 30 minutes fuel is gonna be more than 95F. When we had some fuel pressure problems with a turbo Mx5. After 30 minutes external fuel tank temperature was (more than the exterior of the final exhaust muffler) around 130-140F. Muffler was at abient temperature so heat was fuel pump induced
While it doesn't offer much of a power gain, I imagine that the colder fuel would increase the mpg.
I think the reson for the the difference with a carb motor is where the fuel comes in. With carb at the beginning and with a EFI right before entering the cylinder. The carb had time to mix with the air and lower the charge temp. I think.
I think you would need to super cool the fuel , like down to the temp right before the fuel “ freezes” . As the fuel gets colder it should become more dense and can fit more in the same size tank .
Looks like all it did was even out some of the little dips and that's it, And YES, Absolutely do more tests, More tests are better!
I'm thinking dry ice + acetone (-78c ) and a wet setup (carb or tbi) should show an improvement. Not practical in a race application but would be cool to see the results.
Definitely please go further in this direction
Try it with a turbo and moving injector location, some BMW use water injection to cool the intake manifold (what I think that it's happening) is that the fuel has to be able to vaporize when the heat in the combustion chamber is enough, so it needs to be in very tiny droplets and a little high temperature, but before entering the combustion chamber the fuel could transfer his coldness into the intake air charge to make it densier, and therefore the fuel being hot enough and the air cold enough, so moving the injectors should help, and increasing temperature difference like in a turbo aplication should also help, becauseof it can take more advantage of it
water vaporizing takes a lot of energy.
like swamp coolers and such.
same for the fuel vaporizing. or water boiling, doing the boiling up an amount of water takes more energy than bringing the water to a boil for same reasons.
Yes with a vortech mine seems to like it
Hmm really interested in seeing this one
the problem i see is, that we talk about a relative small amount of fuel over time going into them engine. so you do cool down the fuel, but by the time it gets to the injectors it heats up again. surely cooling it even more can kinda help, but even so my suggestion would be to somehow insulate the fuel rail it self and cool that as well. should make a difference, but i would not expect anything ground breaking...for that you would need to cool the fuel down to sub zero celsius values anyways.
Might see a bigger change on an all out big boost combo. Sometimes a little heat helps atomisation though. I think the power gain from ethanol is because it carries its own oxygen molecule as well as 6 hydrogen molecules. You should do a 10% nitromethane test!
My immediate thought was that cold fuel might hurt atomization, but that's probably only a case with low pressure systems (34psi fords)
A system with a high base fuel pressure (>60psi) would likely negate that downside, but I suspect the benefits and detriments are so miniscule to be immeasurable.
As Richard said, maybe e85 where the volume of fuel is higher might bring into a measurable level.
@@MeatPoPsiclez Cold fuel does hurt atomisation. This is also why engines today run hotter with thermostats around 100c as engines at 80c experience more fuel condensing on the cylinder wall meaning less power from the same amount of fuel. LPG is great for charge air cooling and methanol is good because you have a lower air fuel ratio meaning more liquid mass to absorb heat and it creates a lot of water vapour which cools the combustion chamber.
I would try it on a carb or efi carb style setup where the fuel enters at the beginning of the system
works on carbs
I feel like the carb set up has a better chance to see temps drop but I oy if it's not sitting in the bowl for forever. Probably needs timing to see it's fullest potential
Do all three, and relocate the injectors. Plus: Add table salt to the ice bucket (Too improve heat transfer) and run a larger color as well. I have a feeling that if you get high-content alcohol-based fuel cold enough, it'll be like "Who needs an intercooler...?!" Especially if the injector placement is stratified correctly.
I think the cooling of the inlet charge is dominated by the "latent heat of vaporization" (the phase change from liquid to vapor) than by conduction of colder liquid in contact with the air.
I have seen 7-8% added fuel trim correction with high fuel temps on E85 in a boosted application but only in vacuum. We're talking 110F+ down to 85F. Tropical environment.
Some key considerations.
1, fuel atomization v vaporization. Colder fuel is harder to vaporize, which leads to combustion anomalies because of wet flow changes. As more atomized fuel can enter the chamber and less vaporized, the wet flow now, theoretically, favours a leaner tune. This would be interesting to test on both low octane fuel and E85.
2, an engine uses air as its source to generate cylinder pressure. The fuel heats said air when its burnt. In this fuel injected example, colder fuel doesn't change the density of air to increase the cylinder pressure, only the fuel burning characteristics. Compared to a carburetor application, the colder carby lowers air temperature. Because the air is colder, it will expand more when heated, thus generating extra cylinder pressure.
3, it would be interesting to see if timing changes were made, or if a/f ratio changed.
one needs to look at how much the fuel itself cools just by turning from liquid to a vapor.
Definitely try this on a boosted application with direct injection. Also, put the fuel in the freezer
I ran circle track we were running a zz4 with a carb before qualifying we always packed the intake and carb with dry ice and wrapped with towels covered the fuel cell with dry ice bumped the timing up blocked off the nose put sterno camping fuel on the bottom of the air cleaner hat and it always picked up time on the track it definitely lowers intake air temps
Two things, think ice cream cooler. You can get the water below freezing by using a brine slurry. Second, as I understand it, there is more chance of fuel dropping out when the exhaust crossover is blocked on an intake, hence the use of downleg boosters to provide better atomization. So how does cooling the charge not also create or have the potential to create more fuel dropping out of suspension? I remember Smokey Yunick superheating fuel for his little Fiero project to make it (I suppose) super efficient.
Cooled fuel does not shrink and then expand to a larger volume. Fuel needs to expand to mix into the correct ratio to burn....cooling will cause thos process to take longer. Super cooled air contracts then expands rapidly when heated creating more volume and pressure inside a confined space giving a larger volume to burn when compressed. The old police interceptor I had used a brass plate I'm the bottom of the intake to super heat the fuel quickly into gaseous form and using cooled air did give it good performance.
Fuel turns into vapor before it’s fired that cooler temp fuel wont matter after it gets vaporized/mixed with warm air, now if you dropped temp of incoming air to match the temp of the fuel that will impact more as its will be a cooler charge all together. There is 12.7:1air to fuel ratio feeding a engine so the air temperature will have a larger impact.
The best chance for the fuel temp to make a difference is a draw-through supercharger, esp a roots with all its turbulence.
Very very interesting 🤔
So many things with this test, I'm not even sure where to start. Actual fuel temps at cylinder (or no dead head fuel rail), the latent heat of vaporization of gas is not like that of ethanol (so stop comparing it). Cold gasoline is not the same. It will struggle to vaporize in the same way. Yes, more compression (boost or CR) will help. More time in the air will also help (see carbs or running dual injectors per runner).
I would be curious to see what individual EGTs were on this test. I bet the correlate well with rail fuel temps.
I could have a fun evening discussing this.
Definitely try this on a roots type supercharger on a big block chevy
I’d like you see it on a boosted application. For sure. I’ve always wanted to make a cooling tank under the hood on a turbo car. I’d like to know if I’m wasting my time. I thought it would make a difference. I thought it would work on a NA engine too. But I guess not !?!?!
It sounds like the combination of cubes, cooled fuel & the carburetor did the trick. So🤔, I suggest that you try boost, cooled fuel & cubes. Maybe a 408/416 LS, between a 76 & 88mm hairdryer, Carb vs EFI, Cooled 93 vs cooled E85. That should yield some nice gains...hopefully.
You might see a bigger change if the fuel temp was closer to what we see in the car after being heated and returned to fuel tank. Id have to guess it gets to around 130-140 degrees eventually
on port injection is no fuel return into tank, tank pump sends fuel to engine and pressure regulator on fuel rail near injectors keeps pressure steady
Wonder how cooling the air charge as well as the fuel would go?
Great video
I ran a 12 X 12 fuel cooler on my 76 gmc sprint after I did a mild build on the 350. It could be 95+ degrees and the carb would have condensation dripping off of it. Never had a problem with vapor lock! I would love to see what happens with a boosted engine running pump gas with no ethanol.
you should take a street driven car that has the same motor your gonna use, test the fuel temps on a hot day driving around. Replicate those temps on the dyno for NA and boosted, get the dyno numbers for both setups, then do runs on both with the chilled fuel. It would be a more real world test in my opinion, you could put the cooler in a bucket of fairly hot water to raise the temps. That I would love to see the results of, I live in south florida and rock a fox body with a 5.0. It's been mid 90's every day here and I bet my fuel get stupid hot, I'm curious what kind of temps my fuel is when driving around town.
Heating a nitrous bottle keeps the valve from freezing during decompression. Really important for the dragstrip.
It's not the temp of the fuel that gets it done. It's the temp change of the air. That's why on boosted applications, a intercooler makes a difference. Good example to promote the theory is turbo diesel. Get that fuel down to 40° and see what happens. It's a dog on power production. Now cool the intake charge of any combo by 40°. The fuel vapor is more volatile then solid droplets of fuel. Even the direct injected LT is to cool the tops of the piston. For higher compression tolerances and lubricating. That where the power increase comes from.
I can explain your result Richard. Basically two things happen here, you heat the fuel from the starting temperature to the boiling point, then you vaporise it (boil it). The act of vaporising most liquids will take far more heat out of the air than the heat it will absorb just coming up to the boiling point.
I will give you some numbers so it makes more sense (A quick google gives me all of the info for ethanol, petrol wasn't as easy to find so I will pretend you're using ethanol, concept is the same either way, I'm also going to use metric because I'm Aussie). While the fuel is still liquid it will take about 2.5kJ to heat 1kg up by 1 degC, ethanol will vaporise at approx 80 degC. From a starting point of 32 degC thats a 48 degree difference, so it will take 94kJ to heat that fuel to boiling point. From a temperature of 80 degC it will then take an additional 850kJ to turn that fuel into a vapour. Thus, only about 10% of the heat taken from the air is used to heat the fuel to boiling point, the other 90% is used to vaporise the fuel.
So by lowering the fuel temperature to 6 degC you are removing an additional 52kJ (32 degC - 6 degC = 26, 26*2.5kJ=52kJ). Before you cooled the fuel it took a total of 944kJ to vaporise 1kg of fuel, now it takes 996kJ, so you have cooled the charge air by an additional 5.5%, which is likely why you didn't see a difference.
If you knew the fuel flow and air flow you could always calculate the theoretical change. (this could be done just from the power figure, but who's got time for that)
couldn't have said it better, though I think it's over most people's heads!
you actually don't know how much we cooled the charge air because of the time element-that's why I don't test math equations.
I can work the air temperature change out for you Richard, do you have the fuel flow rate for that run? Judging by the video you didn't take airflow readings. Granted what I can work out will be best case scenario, as in we assume all of the fuel was vaporised, but I should be able to get close to a real world figure with the correct data
I did some calculations, an engine running on e100, running slightly rich, using 300g/s of air will see 0.6 degC lower air temps from using 6 degC fuel compared to 32degC fuel.
@@tx5brent you're my hero
Would it add power on the same NA 302 on a back to back test with a RPM Air Gap and a Carb over the GT40? The difference between your results and Engine Masters makes me wonder if the Carb is the secret. Great video as usual.
CARB IS THE SECRET