200 Tdi air filter, snorkle etc

Hi

I have a locally made (ie not very good) snorkle on my 200 tdi Defender. It uses the hole in the wing top, rather than the side, and a long section of hose.

I was thinking of connecting it back up, which got me onto looking at the whole air intake system, and how ruddy awful it is.

As standard, air gets sucked in through a tortuous mess of pipes, then:

1. The air cleaner

This rests against the top coolant hose on my car, heating up the air... and is right behind the intercooler, directly in line with the hot airflow.

2. The turbo

Again, heating up the air, but unavoidably

3. The turbo - intercooler pipe - again, touching the top hose, so heating it up again...

4. The Intercooler - finally bring the temperature down a little (and dumping a fair proportion onto the air cleaner casing), before making it's way back into the inlet manifold.

This strikes me as daft. Turbo charged engines like cold intake air, hence the intercooler.

Virtually all of the intake plumbing is right next to the coolant pipes, and must be suffering from heat soak.

There must surely be a better way?

My car has an electric radiator fan, so I have lots of space behind the rad.

There's loads of space on the other side of the engine, too, above the injector pump.

I've been thinking about full width intercoolers, chargecoolers, moving the intake and replumbing things, but someone cleverer than me must have been there before.

Any ideas?

Also, is a cold air ram intake, either off the snorkle or from behind the grille, beneficial to a turbo charged engine?

all engines like cold air as its denser ie more o2 for volume,just tighten waste gate arm as it will give you more than all the other buggering about apart from bigger inter cooloer but it will give more lag

Through the hole in the top.... howdoes yer heater work?

bustersbus said:

Through the hole in the top.... howdoes yer heater work?

Click to expand...

Last time I checked I had 2 holes in my wings

khaos said:

Last time I checked I had 2 holes in my wings

Click to expand...

Aye... one on top fur heater and one on side fur air intake

Mines a left hand drive - so the heater comes in through the right hand wing (from the drivers seat).

I could just wind the boost up, but boost equals heat, and that I don't need. I'm running a smaller turbo than standard, and I spend a lot of time pulling up steep inclines - as fast as is reasonable - and more than enough time on full throttle in deep sand.

Air temperature? Ambient is anything up to 52 degrees C in the summer....

I need reliability, and any increase in power that goes hand in hand with reliability. Hence I'm looking for lower air intake temperatures.

In those temperatures theres nothing you can do to minimise the air temp going into the turbo or engine.

Even if there was by the time you've fecked about adjusting and moving pipes and hoses you may get an extra few horsepower...which will increase your fuel costs and stress the engine...so its a pointless exercise.

bustersbus said:

Aye... one on top fur heater and one on side fur air intake

Click to expand...

I've got 2 on the tops and sides We don't all have fancy snow deflector thingys.

Storm 99; with respect, I feel you are wrong.

Ambient air temperature is max 52 degrees C

Coolant temperature is circa 90 degrees C in the same circumstances.

So there has to be an advantage in minimising intake temperatures, and therefore exhaust gas temperature.

In fact, I'd have thought the importance and potential for cooling the intake air was both greater and more critical in high ambient temperatures.

Has no one tried chargecooling? Cross flow intercoolers that move the filter to the 'cool' side of the engine bay?

Or am I just imagining the benefits?

I have a defender 90 200tdi with straight through exhaust, tweaked pump and turbo set as per 300tdi; i.e. 1.0 bar max boost. It has run faultlessly like this for the past 25k miles.

My air intake system is bog standard with no snorkel or an other fancy bits. I also have a boost gauge permanently plumbed in that sits on the dash. I originally used this to tweak the turbo by doing flat out runs up a long incline.

I then conducted an experiment to see how much restriction the standard air intake system gives. I did this by doing several runs, firstly nothing connected to turbo intake. Nice sharp response, 1.0 bar max boost. Second run with filter housing only (no element). Same result. Next with the rest of the plumbing to the passenger wing, still no element. Still sharp.

Lastly I added the (Britpart) filter element which took the edge off the performance but 1.0 bar boost is still achievable.

My conclusion being that the standard system is probably as good as you will get and still achieve full engine protection. Any filtration system is bound to have a certain amount of restriction. A genuine LR filter element might be less restrictive but that test will have to wait.

A more scientific test would probably need a flow bench and rolling road, things that I don't have.

Any thoughts anyone??