i had this idea for a device to add more hp..just wondering if yall think it could work. i was thinking about a grilled "sheet", a couple inches thick, that could bolt on to the underside of the hood. the hot air that comes off of the engine would be sucked up into the device thru the grills where it was cooled while traveling through it, and then either being forced back into the engine immediately, or stored up and compressed until you manually released it into the engine for an added boost. same idea as a supercharger, but could work along with it. the supercharger forces in the air that it brings into the engine bay, while this decive forces in the air that it collects from the heat coming off the engine. i was sitting here thinking one day and came up w/ this, just wondering what yall think about it...

 

it woudn't work.

from what i am gathering from your post, the air is sucked into this box, and then it is cooled and forced back into the engine or stored to gain pressure.

the main reason it wont work is that when you cool a gas, you decrease volume, and pressure. if you wanted to get real technical about it, you would have to look at the heat transfer qualities of the materials you used.

how would you build up pressure inside this grille? with holes in the bottom, you would have an equalized pressure which would be the same as the atmospheric pressure.

what you are thinking of is getting energy from nothing. which right now is pretty hard to do .

you probably could get the same effect that you want from a cowl induction hood or a ram air hood which have inlets where there is either a high pressure (cowl) or a high velocity (ram) region on the car body.

 

the power output would be the same as the supercharger alone would produce, possibly less due to the restriction. Good thinking, but you have to file ideas like this under the "trying to lift yourself up by your own shoelaces" file. In otherwords there is no free power and if it restricts or takes more power to do it than it generates then it isnt practical.

 

ok, i have a couple more ideas i want to throw out there just to see what yall think, i may still be fooling myself into thinking it could work.

one thing first....does either a turbo charger or supercharger cool the air? or just shove it into the engine? if either of them cool the air first, then my idea is just a much bigger, more expensive, less practical idea. if they don't cool the air, then i guess my carries a little bit more weight, depending on how much more hp compressed cold air produces than compressed hot air.

GRILLED SHEET CONSTRUCTION - The grilled sheet would be about 3 inches thick, and be almost the size of the hood, and bolted to the underside of it. Inside of the sheet would be a long metal tube which snakes back and forth throughout the whole thing. (The same way you cut the grass with a mower). The air would travel through this pipe, snaking it's way through it. Having to travel this much distance would give it a while to cool. You could use a substance that is extremely cold in the liquid state, and have it running the whole distance of the tubes on the outside of them, cooling the air inside.

Once the air gets to the end of the snaking tube, it would leave the grilled sheet through a pipe. It could kinda look look like this:

,,,,,,,,,______
____/,,,,,,,,,,,l___
_l_l_l,,,,,,,,,,,,l___
,,,,,,,\______l


****Sorry, I know this picture is confusing. Ignore all of the commas!! I had to put them in, because if just put in spaces, when i posted the message the picture was all scrambled up. So just look at the major lines and try to ignore the commas****

The air would enter on the left hand side. Those vertical lines are "valves" that would restrict airflow to only going in. To the right of the chamber is a valve leading out, and there would be some kind of fan device taht would suck the air out of the chamber and force it into the engine. Once the air leaves the chamber, there will be a vacuum inside of the chamber, which would cause the chilled air inside of the tubes to rush into the chamber and be pressurized. Once the chamber filled up, the fan/pump would suck the air out of the chamber and force it into the engine, creating a vacuum in the chamber again and causing the air in the tubes to rush into the chamber and being pressurized. And so the cycle would continue.

With this setup, there would have to be a button inside of the car where you could release the pressurized air into the engine, and then a light could come on once the chamber refilled, and you could release it again.

If there wasn't enough air present to really make this work, you could draw air in from under the fender or through the hood. This would seem like the same thing as a supercharger, but the air would be chilled very cold here, which (I think) would increase the HP.

Another idea, is instead of one of those chambers, there could be three. Two small ones and one large one. The air would fill up the large chamber where it would be released into the engine. The two small chambers would currently be sucking in new air, ready to go into the large chamber. This way you could have a constant flow of air and therefore, HP.

If this chamber system wouldn't work, you could use the cooling method I mentioned but have it be compressed however the turbochargers/supercharger compress it. It is my understanding that chilled compressed air provides more hp than hot compressed air.

Sorry this thing ran on so long, I just got to thinking and the words kept flowing. Well, let me know your thoughts on the "New and Improved" version.

 

I'm 99% this wouldn't work based on a few premises:

1. Turbochargers and superchargers compress the air that they "pump" creating above atmospheric pressures which is why you see 14 psi of boost or 7 psi of boost when takling about power adders. There's no way that this method would create above atmospheric pressure conditions, so it would have no real advantage over, say, a boxed cowl induction hood.

2. As far as your device working with turbochargers and superchargers...it's basically an intercooler. Although it's a good idea, it's far from a new idea.

3. Lets say you had a 3 gallon tank for the compressed air. That would only be 11.355 Liters. A 350 cubic inch engine is 5.7 liters. Assuming that it was running at 100% VE, that would only fill the cylinders for 4 revolutions of the engine. So there wouldn't be nearly enough air for the engine to use.

4. For the three tank idea...the fact that the smaller tanks are filling the bigger tank is cool, but what's filling the smaller tanks? and what's filling those tanks? So it's almost like chasing your tail in a sense.

So I don't think the idea would work, but you've got the right mindset. Keep trying man, the best ideas come after the not so great ones. I mean none of this in a condiscending way, we're all here to learn and teach.

Good Luck
Tony

 

yeah i see what you're saying, oh well i'll keep thinking.....just for reference....the air supply wouldn't run out because when the air in the big canister was sucked into the engine, new air would be sucked from under the hood and into the device, so whenever the air was sucked into the engine there would be more coming in behind it to keep it constant. but anyway, i see what you're sayin w/ your points. thanks for helping me out since i couldn't see the flaws of my own design..

 

sorry for the double post

 

 

BS? why do you say that?

 

Wow, score for helpful posts:

Jaydub: 1

...come on man

 

There is no way for this setup to build any pressure. As was already stated, cooling air down condenses it. That isn't the same as pressurizing it. In fact, the opposite will happen. Basically, the density of air = mass of the air / volume of the air. As temperature increases, the volume of the air increases (due to thermal expansion) and the density decreases. Mass stays constant. You don't lose any air as you heat it or cool it down. On the flip side, as the temperature decreases, the volume also decreases. This causes the density of the air to increase, but it's the volume that affects the pressure, and when volume decreases, so does pressure. This is why you get a pressure drop across an intercooler. The intercooler cools the pressurized air down. The cooler air is more dense, has less volume, and thus has less pressure. The cooler air allows you to run more ignition timing without causing detonation (the hotter the air is before it enters the combustion chamber, the more likely it is to detonate prematurely).

So as air passes through your grilled sheet and cools down, it decreases in pressure. You aren't going to get any pressurization by cooling the air down alone. That just goes against the laws of physics.

 

I think it would be easier to cool the fuel with a canister with dry ice. Run the fuel line thu a large canister in a coil . It would not do much but would cool the fuel alittle. You would have to have a big canister to keep enough fuel cooled for a long run. I know the NASCAR guys cool the gas cans between pit stops. Kind of like frosting a beer mug . In the old days the carb guys has a set up something like this but it was a small canister.
I guess you could build a air box low on the front of the car that the air pick up tub ran thru and filled it with dry ice. You would only be able to use it for drag racing as the ice won't last long. It would have to have a drain on the bottom to release the water after each run. Then the next run refill it with more dry ice while in the staging lane. That is something that might work but again it would just be for drag racing. The problem would be keeping the dry ice from melting at the track. But it would make more HP. Kind of like why we get our best times in the colder months.