heat wrapping intakes?
 

so i know we can all tell after we've been driving the z for a while. it gets hot under the hood, our cars pull timing, and sh!t gets sluggish. so why has nobody tried throwing some header wrap on their long tubes to prevent that metal from getting hot? idk if anyone has ever tried grabbing their long tube intakes after driving a while, but they are hot as hell. at least my injen is.

so what would prevent someone from throwing some header wrap on the intake piping to keep the hot air out and cold air in. or is header wrap unidirectional? i.e. header wrap is designed to keep the headers heat in, whereas we want to keep heat out? would it be worth looking in to....?

another random idea...

I actually have seen this done on other cars. I’m pretty sure somebody has done this to their Z.

My understanding is the main reason is to prevent corrosion, water can stay underneath the wrap which will start the pipe to corrode.....

im not sure at all tho..... i have this debate with myself regularly on my Z and my 11" sti stage 2 with dump tub plumbed back it...

in the end im mostly likely going to take my pipes Z, swaintech coated and wrapped when boosted and get the sti just coated. Most likely it's just a Band-Aid, not really fixing the real problem of the heat in our engine bays.

Its the wrong type of heat control for the application. The header wrap is meant to retain heat in the manifolds. You do not want to keep heat in your intake system. Most companies have come to the market with reflective tape that helps prevent the piping from getting heat soaked from the engine bay temperatures. You can see some reflective heat tape HERE. This would be the right stuff to wrap an intake with!

Thanks,
Alex Goodwin
AlexG@motionlabtuning.com

Heat wrap (or insulating wrap) is what you use on the exhaust to keep heat IN. You would want exactly the opposite on the intake side, which is to keep heat OUT.

For that you would use heat shielding, typically gold foil. See the picture below.

https://www.lgmotorsports.com/galler...estrictors.JPG

thanks for the responses. thats what i was kinda wondering. man if only that reflective stuff wasnt so ugly lol.

any intake temp charts available that shows the delta between using this stuff and not

I used this wrap on our Jeep and it worked rather well. I used the non-tape type as I didn't want the tube all sticky if I decided to remove it, I attached it using reflective tape.

http://www.the370z.com/members/icorm...-img-3258a.jpg

anyone have the torque app for their andriod that can display air inlet temps (maybe i can use my laptop and uprev?) to see if this would have any real world benefit

Thermal insulation is "omnidirectional." It impedes the transfer of heat in all directions.

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that a combination of reflective (reject as much as possible) and insulation (slow down any energy not reflected) would work best.

Looks great! Heatshield Products is definitely offers some of the highest quality heat control products on the market. I sell their products to industrial manufacturing companies that use specific products to help protect wiring etc. around their robotic TIG welders.

Thanks
Alex Goodwin
AlexG@motionlabtuning.com

I'm not familiar with the UpRev software, but Inlet Air Temp (IAT) is part of the standard data that most cars have available. If IAT display is not a standard option in UpRev, let me know and I can provide the PID and scaling for manual configuration (assuming UpRev allows such).


-Edit-
Mode: 01
PID: 0F
Data: 1 hex byte
Data Range: 0-255 (dec)
Data Units: degrees C
Scaling: data - 40

Not sure what all this means. i'm more confused than a chameleon in a bag of skittles.

Wait until you find out how much it costs.

I watch the IAT on my Dashhawk all the time. If you are moving and at WOT the temps with the Stillen G3 are pretty close to ambient. Even after a cool down lap on partial throttle at a track last weekend I still saw close to ambient.

I have dei reflect a gold wrap on my stillen intakes. I can't comment on the performance gain if any, I figured it certainly wouldn't hurt

This is what I did with my Typhoon K&N intakes it drop the oil temp by 4 degrees on my regular drive and it takes longer to reach past 220 on hard driving. Don't know if there is any connection but the car runs better.

I have Torque Pro for android and a Bluetooth OBD-II adapter if you wanna give it a try.

I'll check tomorrow to see if I can set it up for intake temps.

here is my setup, AEM intakes with DEI gold heat reflective tape, this was the 15 foot roll and it was not enough, i shouldve got the 30 foor. ill be getting another roll to finish them off but at least i got the high heat section taped up

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphoto...67897006_n.jpg

I had some of the reflective heat wrap on my G3's, but got tired of them looking so ugly and took it off. Didn't notice any difference in performance from when I had them on to when I took them off.

The stock intakes are plastic for a reason, plastic is a good insulator and has low thermal conductivity. When installing the G3's I did get some performance improvement driving around on the street, but after 10 minutes on the track the tubing was reaching 230F and doing a lovely job of being a "hot air" intake instead of a cold one. I used some reflective wrap insulation on the intakes and it did help bring down the temperatures back down, although still not quite as low as stock.

i was planning on getting a vented hood for track days as well, cause stock its like a oven in there

I LOT of people have their intakes wrapped, just need to find the right nutter who actually thought ahead when he/she was doing the install

One of our hard core track enthusiast buddies used the gold something or other, but his stiff was insulated as well as gold, he said that it keeps temps down 15-30 degrees. BUT (wait for it)

I used header wrap, a lot of it


But once everything heats up to operating temperature, no wrap would really help, if you have a vented hood where ambient heat doesn't get stored and can be vented out, then MAYBE you'd notice a difference The wrap can hopefully deflect the heat that is rising to some degree...

if i get aftermarket headers ill wrap them, im still going to get a hood more so for cooling in general not just to keep the intakes cooler

If you are using OBD/CAN monitoring (eg, UpRev, ScanGaugeII), the Intake Air Temperature is readily available. I would guess that most software will have IAT as a pre-configured item (pick from a list) for monitoring. The few apps I have played with all had it pre-configd. If it is not pre-configd, you may be able to use the Mode/PID info to manually set it up.

I miss the people in this thread most of them are gone!

DepointfiveO where are you buddy? :-(

Always heat wrap my intakes and test pipes.. Heat saturation is so bad in the engine compartment.

http://www.the370z.com/members/nut_n...7-img-0708.jpg

http://www.the370z.com/members/nut_n...6-img-0705.jpg

... I thought you were supposed to “heat wrap” your exhaust to keep the heat in/away from surroundings and use heat reflective tape to repel external heat from penetrating intake piping

There was heat shield wrap under that. I didnt want my engine compartment to look bedazzled lol.