[Intrepid _96_35L]

Ok so far its all in my head but if I can confirm that its possible I'll post full specifications and pics with details as I have it built. (It shouldn't even look that bad, I hate to change the contours of our hood but this should fit niecely) Its so simple its genius. I just wonder why no one has thought of this setup yet, or maybe they have and there is a problem I haven't considered, thats why I'm posting this.
It came to me last night at 4am my usual blissful sleep was apparently on hold as I tossed and turned for hours, eventuall my mind drifted to, of all things, my car and after accidentally mashing my head off the headboard :crazy: it came to me, what appears to be the perfect setup for ram air on a 3.5L intrepid. :biggrin: (I know it sounds a little questionable but if a falling apple can do it for Newton maybe a good wack with a headboard is what I needed, that or I have a concussion)
I can't claim it to be completely original as I borrowed some info from the posts on this site. (The battery can be moved, to the trunk right??? this would be by far the hardest part)
For now I'll just say it involves quite a bit of custom fabrication but nothing that should be that expensive, some of you could probably do most it yourselves. It is very simplistic in its design but should be very efficient based on my somewhat limited knowledge of basic fluid dynamics.
Now here is the one problem that I can't work out on my own given the knowledge I know possess.(besides how to get rid of this headache that is) HOW MUCH WILL A GOOD RAMAIR RAISE THE PRESSURE AND CAN AN INTREPID HANDLE IT WITHOUT MODS SUCH AS A BOOST GUAGE AND CUSTOM PROGRAM ETC.
If I remember correctly a trep can handle pressures up to 14psi or 1 bar or something like that(I will look it up again soon, its in a post somewhere, assuming that the original post was accurate) Anyway does anyone know if this is the pressure a trep regularly runs at or if this is just what an intrpeid could run at if it could somehow get it.

Please if anyone knows anything for 100% certain it would be great, educated guesses are also welcome as long as knowone says they are absolute fact. I'd hate to find out the hard way that someone was off a bit on thier guess, and that I just cooked the best car I've ever owned.

 

[Sk8-4ever]

Go whack you head some more if you think of good ideas when you do

 

[Ph33rdecals.com]

B]"Go whack you head some more if you think of good ideas when you do"[/B]


What

 

[silver ghost]

"Pressure" is bad. Vacuum is good. A naturally aspirated engine runs off of vacuum (ours). Normal operating range for vacuum ranges from @25" down to 0. During college I did an experiment with a 3.3 trep and the DRB3 (scan tool) and did a data record of a road test to see what was happening when the car was beaten, I mean driven. Strangely enough at a few distinct points i noticed that the "m.a.p." (manifold absolute pressure) which reads negative pressure (vacuum) sensor reading had blipped to positive. It happened right after a hard decel then snapping the throttle open. Chryslers' explanation was a surge of air entering the manifold caused the reading.

But anyway, what is it that you wanted to know?

 

[bnelly428]

when you speak of a ram air, are you talking about the ram air intake from like the pontiac grand am gtp or whatever that car is with the v6 grand am. i've seen that, and i dont think we could do that to our cars because of the radiators in front of our grill, unless we could somehow put the intake through the grill on the lower bumper and run a pipe to the engine, i don't think that would be efficient only because the pipe will be very large. Im not sure if that is what you're talking about but thats it
brian

 

[Intrepid _96_35L]

One whack was more than enough.

Ok seriously though. Silver Ghost, you said vacuum good but pressure bad. When the engine trys to "suck in" air it creates this vacuum as it pulls air through the intake and into the combustion chamber right. When you say pressure exactly what do you mean. Do you mean to say having air blowing through the intake toward the engine and pushing its way in with the engines "sucks" would be a bad thing. Isn't this very roughly what a ramair intake or a hood scoop is supposed to do.
What I mean to say is think of what it is like trying to inhale through a small straw, you suck as hard as you can but can't get much air and you eventually get dizzy and passout. Well what if the straw was an air hose with air blowing through it so that when you sucked, air blew right into you lungs with very little sucking effort by you, giving you plenty of air to breath easily. Again very roughly isn't this the basic idea behind ram air.

As for what I wanted to know, how much air can I have entering the engine before it gets to be more than the engine can handle. I'm not great explaining things in technical terms so here goes the breathing analogy again, this time instead of having enough air flowing into the straw to allow you to breath comfortably imagine you have an air compressor hose, when you start to suck it suddenly forces so much air into your lungs they explode. This in so many terms is not what I want to do to my engine, I need to know if haveing a ram air system that is to effective would overload it.

To say very crudely I want to find out if there are substantial enough gains to be had by installing a ram air to make it worth while, in theory I could make one with a massive scoop that forces tons of air toward the engine, but this would be beyond its capacity right? Or I could make a tiny scoop that barely flows more air than stock but has nearly no benefit to power, throttle response, or fuel economy. I've got to find the happy medium that will not cause the engine to have more air than its sensors can recognize and adjust for but that will give it substantially more and create some worthwhile gains.

As to what Bnelly said about the grand am gtp, I've never heard of it, I know of the grand prix gtp but I havn't scene one, and I think it has a supercharger not ram air. And I'm not going to run pipes through the radiator. I think I can get them low enough to be in the pressure zone without doing that.
Just for reference it would be great if someone had something like a pic of a trep in a wind tunnel test. Then we could see just how and where air flows.

 

[viprman]

I believe that a "cowl induction" set up would be better for our cars with the 3.5 because of the location of the throttle bodies. Sorry, but I don't have any detailed drawings for one yet.