Heat - Insulate or reflect ?
Discussion
Back on the topic of keeping the air intake cool when the engine is hot.
Any thoughs on whether it is better to insulate the air flow pipe against heat or to cover it in reflective material.
Someone suggested that a very simple (and cheap) solution might be to wrap the pipe in tin foil ! At first I thought this was daft, but may be it is as simple as this.
OK maybe something more suitable than tin foil, but it does raise the question as to whether reflection of heat is as good as insulation against heat.
Or is the answer to do both ?
Relection of heat will work to some degree if the car is moving and air is flowing - but as soon as you stop in stationary traffic, heat soak takes over and Tin foil is going to do didly squat - Tin foil has very little mass, so it will soon heat up itself - this heat will then pass through into the air intake pipe.
So to get the best of both worlds - id insulate it to stop heat soak - then wrap in foil to add some relection when moving.
The other thing to consider here is that the air filter is mounted very low - only a few ches above the raod surface - in sunny weather the tarmac gives off alot of heat - so the air being pulled in at that height could be a good few degrees than the air higher up - so a bit of replumbing maybe required for max benefit.
cheers
chris
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