a few people have said to me recently that a standard airbox will be better for my car i.e power figure, cos the cone filter only sucks in hot air.

on a N/A car i would tend to agree, but surely on my car, with pro-alloy cooler, by the time that 'slightly' hotter air is compressed, then cooled by the I/C it will enter the engine at the same or very similar temps.

so, what i am saying is the standard airbox will probably draw cooler air into the turbo, but the effects of the intercooler will overcome any shortcomings of a cone filter,

OR is it more linear like;

airbox temps 40 degrees C ---> I/C inlet 75 degrees C --->I/C outlet 40 degree C = 35 DegreeS drop

so ;

cone filter temps 45 degrees C ---> I/C inlet 80 degrees C ---> I/C outlet 45 degrees C = 35 degrees drop but with 5 degrees C increase throughout
( ignore temps , i have no idea what they would be )

i personally reckon the I/C WILL overcome any slight change and will keep temps to roughly the same level

Discuss

 

sorry to potentially kill your thread , but there's no point in discussing it - just test it.

i know of a test facility with the capability to do this that may become available soon

theoretically, you can calculate it, knowing the compression ratio, compressor efficiency etc,etc, but it's not that easy. best to test it.

personally, i doubt that it makes a great deal of difference, and in the end it will come down to a preference in looks or sound.

 

yeah a lot of it is down to preference of looks/sound, but i have heard people say that the car will drive differently with a standard airbox, i personally think they are confusing a quieter induction sound for a smoother drive??

will this test facility need any guinea pigs, FOC of course

 

cone filter only suck hot air.....

stick your head out of the window at 60mp/h....and tell me if its only hot air you feel....

 

exactly my point

 

i'm sure i've been reading this some where else.

 

stick your head beside the inlet at 60mph on full boost and see how cold it is then

the cone filter will suck in hotter air - fact - the cooler will cool it down - fact....BUT if you suck in coler air to start with its going to cool it down more than if it sucked in hot ait.

It's already proven on cossies and rst's std airbox works the best. depends if you want every bit of power or not that bothered.....

Could also look at it as. . why buy a big fancy IC to cool the temps if your going to put a cone on that will make the temps rise....kinda defeats the purpose imo.

 

Put a shield over the filter away from the turbo?

Or mount the cone filter down by the bumper with a long cool hosing

 

I never believed the "standard airbox is best" thing, yep maybe with the car stationary in a garage on a rolling road, but in the real world when air is travelling into the front of your car at god knows how many mph???

Nope, I'll be sticking with my cone in the REAL world.

 

proved where???

 

a lot of people who argue that the standard airbox is much better don't even have the square intake pipe on their car (often taken off when 500 cooler is fitted) so all there doing is sucking air from the engine bay through a 2" square hole & thinking thats a big advantage!!!
mostly personal choice.

 

They actually tested this on a Type RA Scoob in this month's Japanese Performance. Was VERY funny, as the cone filter seller had just said that it was a load of bollocks about cone filters losing power through sucking in hot air in a recent interview.

Guess what, it lost a SIGNIFICANT amount of power to the point where the journalist (who also owns the car) decided of his own accord that the OE air box WAS best and would be put back .

 

bugger all difference on a cossie really IMHO

makes a huge difference on some cars though, early vauxhall XE engine for example REALLY splutters at about 2Krpm normally with a cone filter.
(due to hotwire AMM without ACT reference)

 

Doesnt mean it follows for a cossie which has totally different sensors though of course mike, but an interesting little irrelevant read anyway

 

your spot on about the XE's , mine ran like a bag of shite with a cone filter on, got whooped by a R5 turbo, which prompted me to go straight home and but the standard box back on

[/b]

 

Cossies are even WORSE due to where the turbo is situated .

I have TESTED this and measured the air temps in and around the airbox. Even WITH the airbox you would be amazed at what temps you see when the car has been stationary for any period of time. You would also be amazed at how long it takes for the underbonnet temps to drop (even with air box) .

 

So it makes a big difference to the charge temps at the I/C outlet , or just in and around the airbox ?

 

hotter in = hotter out.


Depends on how its positioned and if you have a decent turbo heat shield etc.

Also depends on how you measure it, a set of rollers will make things look far worse than they are on the road, as the fans never mimic 100mph+ airflow

Thats the fundamental problem with the sort of test mike is describing.


Personally though, i think airbox's are the better idea in general, so im not aruging against them, just saying its very application specific.

 

So what your saying is , the temp drops will always be linear, hotter in hotter out?

I thought maybe you could have a situation where the intercooler is so efficient it will always cool to a certain temp, and not manage to cool much further, obviously if charge temps get so excessive it will struggle, but with what difference there is between cone and airbox , maybe it could cool both to the same point.

i guess similar to the way chargecoolers only seem to be so effective up to a certain core size, and an increase in core has little or no effect.

i was thinking the reverse is true for I/C 's ?

 

I run a cone filter and i can garuntee it sucks in NO hot air whatsoever!

 

do you see any proper racing cars using cone filters??

sorry if i just ended this dissussion lol

 

What happens with ACT as the charge passes through an intercooler is that basically it undergoes what is known in maths as "tending towards a value"

It will NEVER (with the exception of water spray etc) actually manage to equalise temperatures with the outside air, but on a very big intercooler it could get extremely close.

Say you have 75 going in, outside temp of 25 degrees and a massive cooler, you might see 27 degrees for example

Up the input temp to 90, and that might only raise the output temp to 28

So a big difference can result in a very small effect on the engine.

But in another car with an inadeute cooler you may find that a 15 degree rise could result in a 12 degree rise on the output.



Then the fact that no one has mentioned yet, if you have a more restrictive inlet it means the turbo struggles to provide the same boost, and hence raises temperatures by a larger amount than normal.
So even though the air going into the turbo might be slightly warmer the fact that there is so much flow of it can result in a lower temp on the output side of the turbo.



So like i said all along, its VERY application dependant, and like LocalRS says, its far more sensible to just test it than to try and calculate it.

 

Ditto.........(Radient Red tag team)

Filter by "Geeen Cotton" 260 mm x 125 mm diameter mounted in bumper:

 

Over the quarter it also makes a HUGE difference. As I said, the recovery rate takes at least 15 - 30s to get back down to ambient temps, and although the actual air going into the engine is actually cooler than this (because the turbo is flowing HUGE amounts), the ECU doesn't know this, as it is going by what the ACT sensor says it is, so you want as cool air as possible going into the engine to speed up the recovery rate of the sensor (which can see in excess of 80°C from heat soak in stationary / slow moving traffic).

 

Doug, a very good example of correct cone filter instalation

And another for all Mike's attempts to make sweeping statements.


Its down to the specific flow characterists of the filter and filter box in question, the nature of the sensors on the engine, the temps at the time, the boost you are running, the rpm you are at, the speed you are doing, and lots of other factors.

In most applications you will find that swapping from one type of filter to another often results in gains in some places and losses in others, but likewise in some applications its all gains or all losses.

 

how is dougs going to see higher temps than an airbox?

 

No, just stones and water .

Chip,
Not MY idea of a good location, but horses for courses .

 

One minute all your comments are about the quarter, then when you realise you are talking rubbish on that by generalising so much you start swapping it to a wet gravel rally stage.

Phone Harvey and ask him for some more details, i dont think he explained it to you well enough last time mate :P

 

Excuse me, but I was typing a reply to Bud-weis, but by the time I had posted it, there were 3-4 posts in between, which made it look like I replied to Doug .

LOL at rally stage . Every bit of standing water will completely soak the filter in that location and it will need CONSTANT maintenance and checking to ensure it hasn't been holed by stones etc .

 

At which point did this become a discussion on filter maintaince?


Agree with your (off topic slightly) points on easier to keep the airbox ones clean though, dont think anyone would have ever disputed that anyway though, so you are only really arguing with yourself on that one.
But like i said before, every time you realise you are talking nonsense you change the subject slightly, which is EXACTLY what you just did again.

SO predictable mike

 

Mike, before going ahead with the "in bumper" filter mounting job, I did ask Harvey, he said no problem as this set up was used on touring cars for years (including some wet races)......He also said it would be wise to use low boost in very heavy/torrential rain as a precaution......but is those conditions (on a road car) I guess you want to be taking it easy anyway

 

Chip,
I'm not THAT easy to wind up I'm afraid . It's all to do with timing of posting and nothing more .

I'll stick with my modified airbox thank you . It's no cheese off my foreskin what you lot use .

 

Mike read dougs post, it MUST be true, Harvey said so

 

Are Dave n Dougs mounted facing the floor then?

I did this on my fiesta turbo, had the RS500 airfilter facing the floor.............

What a mess it made to the filter I'm sticking with an airbox on mine + K & N Panel filter

 

Best position for a cone filter would be on the owners head.

 

i lost over 20bhp with a viper as it was starving the engine of air.. went back to the proper 200 oe box with a k&n panel filter and got my power back

ill stick with the std box and recommend other 24/200 owners do the same

 

nowhere cos its total and utter bollocks

 

Andy- thats cause the filter setup was fucking shite and restrictive tho, not cause airboxes are better.

Its always a tradeoff between free-flow and heat soak

 

Doesnt seem to be in dougs case