Water/Methanol Injection 2005 C6 Corvette
Huntington Beach, CA April 12, 2007 — SmokinVette.com, a Huntington Beach, CA privately owned Corvette Forum, would like to announce water/methanol injection kits will be added to both our 2005 C6 project Corvettes that’s to the Snow Performance. We’re excited to see the results (dyno results will be posted in our Corvette Photo Gallery soon) that these systems will offer to the (2) different applications. The first being 2005 C6 Corvette (automatic transmission) with a Magnuson Supercharger and the second being a 2005 C6 Corvette (manual transmission) professionally built Naturally Aspirated engine.
A little history on this application:
Water-methanol injection has been in use since the 1930’s as a way to extract as much power as safely possible from internal combustion engines. It gained widespread use in fighter and bomber aircraft during WWII as a way to extract great amounts of horsepower for takeoff and dog fighting. While the physics are the same today, modern technology has allowed greater power increases and better performance while using even less fluid. You could run one system on a turbo diesel tow vehicle and another system on a race vehicle – getting benefits of performance and reliability on both.
How do we get great increases in power on a gasoline engine? Through greatly reduced inlet air temperatures, condensed air charges, and suppressed detonation. Straight water, or a water/methanol mix, is injected in a superfine mist which starts to evaporate once it’s introduced into the intake. This evaporation acts as a cooling process – the same as if you get out of a swimming pool on a breezy day and feel chilled. Typically a 50-150° F intake temperature drop is the result. Cooling the inlet air that much also condenses the air charge, which gets more molecules of oxygen into the combustion chamber. Inside the combustion chamber, the methanol acts as a super-high octane fuel (as much as 120-130 depending on the measurement) to help suppress detonation, and water, being impossible to “flash ignite”, has an almost infinite octane rating and absorbs the peak heat and pressure of combustion. During the combustion process the water turns to steam, increasing cylinder pressure after TDC during the power stroke thereby increasing torque output. Suppressing detonation (typically a 20-23 point octane increase over pump gas) allows for more ignition timing, higher boost levels, higher compression ratios, and a leaner air-fuel ratio to make more power while being safe from detonation compared to what pump gas can support. Power improvements are in the 5-10% range for naturally aspirated engines and 10-20% for forced induction engines, depending on the tune.
Snow Performance has several Boost Cooler™ kits designed for Corvettes, depending on the particular engine configuration. For a naturally aspirated engine, or a positive displacement supercharger like a Magnacharger or a twin-screw, we use our Stage 2 GM MAF Boost Cooler™ (#20012). This system injects proportionally according to the airflow going into the engine, so it is correct over a very wide range, and very easy to adjust the delivery curve of the water-methanol.
For applications with turbos or a centrifugal supercharger, our Stage 2 Boost Cooler™ (#20010) is the correct kit. It injects progressively according boost pressure and is also very easy to adjust for maximum performance increase.
(Source of content: Snow Performance and SmokinVette.com)
Written by Car Enthusiast on April 25th, 2007 with
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