Ideal Tract Length Xu7

[DrSarty 90 1 Cars]

Ok fair one. The moisture/water content of the air freezing. Gotcha.

 

So why do we never bother with the components for our water or electrically heated TBs in most of our conversions then? Surely that's to cope with the cars operating in (other) really cold countries.

[Batfink 201]

Most of us are running injectors close to the head, and without any fancy gaskets to keep the inlet manifold colder so the air does not cool down as much.

[Cameron 16]

Plus most of us are sucking air in from the warm engine bay.

 

Basically its a bit (a lot) like exhaust tuning, in that the ideal length is dependant on the engine speed. At lower engine speeds you want the inlet to be longer, at higher speeds it needs to be shorter. Hence why F1 cars had variable length inlets - before they were banned. If you want to know why, its because the firing frequency increases with engine speed (obviously), and subsequently the wavelength (distance between pulses caused by opening inlet valve) gets shorter.

 

You can only get a ball-park figure by asking on here, if you want it to be exact then you need to do your homework.

Edited October 16, 2009 by Cameron

[Sandy 191]

You can only test it. I've read a heap of theories on how to model inlet length and none of them correlate very well. There's too much going on.