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So the massive mid-Atlantic rains at the end of June caused some serious flooding, so I put my stock air box back in. This gave me an idea of comparing Intake Temperatures between the Stock S2000 Intake and the Original Prototype AEM CAI (passed down through members from XVIPER). So I drove to work with my laptop connected to the OBII port with the stock intake one day. The next week I re-installed the AEM CAI and did another run on my way to work.
This is a summary of the differences
Intake Air Temperature, Engine Coolant Temperature and Vehicle Speed are plotted over time. I removed some of the samples from the beginning data in an attempt to line up the data for highway driving since it's somewhat constant. I added trend lines to the speed data to show where the VSS data lines up. With the AEM CAI (original prototype) it takes longer for the Intake air temperature to warm up (heat soak from engine compartment?) and the intake air temp is always lower than the stock temp.
Intake and Engine Coolant Temperature plotted against speed. Since many temperature points are plotted at each speed, I added trend lines to show the overall effect. It appears that the AEM CAI (original prototype) reduces Intake air temp significantly and may also reduce engine coolant temperature slightly. The data was gathered during my drive to work on two separate days and covers about 35 minutes of drive time.
The first graph compares the intake air temp (IAT) on my way to work (once with the stock air box and once with the CAI). The IAT's are the lines in the middle of the graph.
I added the engine coolant temp ECT (top lines) and the vehicle speed VSS (bottom lines) as a reference. Between points 450 and 600 I was traveling over 60 and you can see that the IAT is always at least 10 degrees cooler.
Since cooler air is denser, more power is produced because spark can be advanced more and more fuel can be burned.
Technically, CAI's only add power when the car is moving so Dyno tests don't show any improvements.
The second graph I tried plotting the IAT at each speed to see if the CAI improved as my speed increased. Since the data was from my drive I've got lots of IAT samples at each speed. You can see that the IAT is all over the place at each speed but the CAI is always cooler so it seems that the CAI always provides a cooler air charge no matter what the speed.
07-07-2006, 08:56 AM
Stock vs AEM CAI Data
