Okay, this always sounds like a rediculous idea to everybody, but can injecting water into your engine really increase horsepower? We are all worried about hydrolocking our engines, because of cais, but I have heard that injecting small amounts of a water/methanol mixture into your engine can increase horsepower. Apparently the game-plan is that the water will cool down incoming air, and will vaporize in the cylinder creating a more pressure within the cylinder. I have also heard of this method used as a way of "intercooling" turbocharged cars. I was just wondering if anybody knew anything more about this method, or if anybody would suggest actually trying it lol.

 

I know that some World War ll aircraft had it but haven't heard of it on a car in many years.

 

*blinks* the only water ive heard used for turboed cars are sprayed on the innercooler

 

Yeah, I've heard about the WWII planes, and the intercooler sprayers. I saw in a magazine recently that people were using water injection after the intercooler to further cool the air entering the intake manifold to help prevent predetonation. I just kinda want to try it out on my NA car, and see if I can't get intake air temps to drop a bit. But I'd feel safer if someone knew whether or not it was going to ruin my engine lol.

 

Water injection... We touched on this briefly at my aviation career campus... on older radial engine planes it was used because the cowling was restricting all the hot air from inside the engine bay they injected small amounts of water into the intake but nowhere NEAR the intake valves... more like upstrem before the carb... of course the only thing my instructor said this was used on was radial engines which were supercharged... which on a radial engine looks like a huge turbo that is actually driven by the crankshaft... kinda weird i dunno much about it but only that it is NOT pure water... also i wouldnt suggest doing this to your car long term unless you REALLY know what your doing... but if you do decide to take this on plz let me know what happends... also why dont you go ahead and shoot NOS and the water and tell me what happends... j/k

 

Haha yeah I'll give that NOS shot a try, that's why it's called a wet system anyway right ? jk lol. Hmmm, well it sounds to me like water injection probably works best with forced induction applications, so I don't know if I will really notice any gains from it on my NA car lol. I dunno, I might try it out if I can do some more research and/or figure out a cheap/easy way to do it... I'll keep you guys posted if I pull anything off lol.

 

You should maybe look into cryogen, I think thats how you spell look at summit auto racing I know they carey it

 

Yeah, I'm interested in that. That's similar to Cry O2 I think. It's something like you purge CO2 gas into your intake to cool down the air right? I was actually thinking about trying to fabricate one of those into my intake but never got around to it. I actually have been wondering about injecting pure O2 gas into my engine, but I think I'll start another thread about that... I'll definitely look into the Cryogen system though. Thanks for the Tip!

 

I put water injection on a 60's vintage V8 car years ago. It was supposed to allow you to run today's gas on the older higher compression engines by slowing down the burn rate of the fuel.It actually worked pretty well once everything was adjusted right, but was problematic; water jet would plug, leak in reservoir, pump quit, etc.

Plus I was always a bit nervous that I might get too much water in and break something. I finally lowered the compression (different heads) and that was the way too go.