yo teemgeek i need help on this one

[slothminx]

ok i have seen in another thread you talking about needing the intake to be warm for the fuel to atomise well on all situations i can think of from drag racers to road cars the intake charge is kept as cool as possible without the intake iceing up. am i missing something here am i wrong in thinking that the colder the intake charge the denser it is and the more power is made. on a cool day and engine will be more powerful than on a really hot day. help me out a bit

thanks will

[mbubbac]

on cars they use cold air cuz cold air is more dense then warm air so they can get more air into the combustion chamber for a bigger bang. warm is is more less dense then colder air, this aint rocket science

[TeamGeek6]

Depends on the application. There is a US Patent by Smokey Yunick from the 1980s in which he designed a Buick V-8 turbocharged engine that went 49 miles per gallon. His design took heat from the exhaust and coolant, and heated the petrol before going into the carburetor, and heated the intake manifold. These were done to completely vaporise the fuel before it hit the cylinder so it all burned.

If one is out to make maximum power, that indicates the most flow of air and fuel into the engine, and thats difficult to do when the air and fuel are hot. True we can stuff more A/F in when its cold (dense) but then it takes more ignition and cylinder heat to burn it efficiently.
Drag racers generally dont care about fuel efficiency.

Back to NASCAR, about 15 years ago, a team was penalised for putting an illegal fuel cooler on the fuel line to cool the fuel before the carburetor, to get more fuel volume.

I personally tend to make engines cool and increase the ignition because a cool engine suffers less loss due to friction. Its easy for me to make excess ignition energy which helps with poorly atomised fuel.

There is no single answer, its all in what the goal is.