Originally posted by Auto-X Fil:
Tom-

My information comes from a pretty reliable source. A couple very bright kids at Penn State who just got their Mech Eng degrees did a senior project on the intake for our Forumula SAE car, and they have found that there is so little laminar flow in any intake that it's not worth designing around: and if there is ANY power to be found, the FSAE guys will design for it! They use two injectors per cylinder, and switch to the one further upstream to enhance atomization at high revs to get 2-3 hp!

Looking at a Catera and the Nissan VQ variable intake, I've wondered which is better. Modern designs have the switching system for the intake near the filter, which eliminates some of the issues we have - dirty butterflys, etc. But I am not enough of an expert to think about redesigning the system. However, there may be some gains in an aftermarket system. Whether it's better to simply rebuild the system like Mustang proposes, or move the secondary intake switching system, I don't know. There's probably not the aftermarket, however, and so we'll never see a $500 intake to get us 10hp. Too bad, because it might even look as cool as the stock one!



It's funny you mention the switching system being moved to the inlet side of the manifold. I had a brainstorm last night (still recovering from that 1..or maybe it was the beer). Picture a very large log with a horizontal divider effectively splitting the manifold in 1/2. The longer primary runners run under the manifold and attach to the upper 1/2 of the log on opposite sides. The secondaries are a straight shot up into the lower half of the log. Basically the same design I proposed earlier but but with a divider. Now you can run a 2 butterfly progressive linkage TB and eliminate the the butterflies on the LIM.