water/methanol injection

[chod]

hello everyone,

I wanted to see if anyone knows anything about the water/meth injection kits? I know a lot of people use them for F/I cars but they also make kits for N/A engines as well. Is this something that could be a good mod for an 05 rsx-s or is it only going to benefit me if I'm running nitrous or FI? I've done some research on the topic and a lot of the info is hit or miss regarding N/A applications. Any feedback is appreciated. If you don't know what I'm talking about here is a link to one of the kits.

The Best Water injection system and water methanol injection systems at AlcoholInjectionSystems.com

[TireMeltingRSX]

I'm not that familiar with kits like these... but I would equate them to those joke "tornado" fuel supercharger systems. I wouldn't install that thing if they gave it to me for free.

[C25A1guy]

Water/Meth injections work, but for a street application n/a motor, it would do little to nothing, and might even possibly harm your engine. For n/a application, it would work best on super high compression ratios (I'm talking 14:1 and higher) to supplement use of whatever petroleum based fuel you may be using.

First, lets take a quick look at the chemical components that make this combination up. Water is of course H2O or H-O-H. Methanol is CH3OH or H-C-H-H-O-H (forgive me, my chemistry is a little rusty, so chem. bond chain may not be completely accurate). Methanol has an octane rating of around 105 or 110 if I remember correctly. While water does very little to nothing in terms of adding octane, what it does to and 1. act as a carrier agent, 2. act in atomization, 3. dilution agent (as 100% methanol is EXTREMELY corrosive) and 4. a cooling agent or vaporizer.

Now going on into general application. Now when the mixture goes into your combustion chamber and gets ignited, several things happen because of this mixture in supplement to the fuel you're using already. First, with the methanol, as I said, as an octane rating of around 105 or 110 (this is using M+T/2 rating, not RON), so it helps to prevent detonation. The water, when in the combustion chamber as the cylinder hits the power stroke vaporizes into a gas. We all know from high school chemistry or physics (hell if I remember which class) that when water evaporates, its an effect of cooling, so, not only will it cool your EGT's, but as its atomized into the intake stream, it will also cool your intake charge, making it much more oxygen dense.

As far as how to tune with it, basically you will need 2 tunes on something like K-pro or EMS. I have some experience with doing this on the EMS system on a supercharged NSX. You'll want to first make your tune without the water/meth to get your base map. Once you have that, you will want to pull up your nitrous table and use that as your fuel + water/meth tune. You can have it automatically switch maps using the armed trigger on the water/meth injection to also act as a switch on the ecu to change maps as well.

[chod]

I had read something about higher compression. So basically I can see some gains out of it if I get my car tuned. Most people just run nitrous but could I get similar gains with the water/meth setup with a tune? Or is this more of an add on with nitrous and FI? Would one be safer than the other? Thanks.

[C25A1guy]

On basically a stock engine, you will see, let me think.... close to 0 HP. The reason being is that on a stock engine (what I mean by that means no change to compression or f/i) it will run pump fuel easily. If anything, if you tune on 100 octane on a stock engine, you'll probably make more gains with less money without having to add anything else. Water injection kits are more in terms to aid fuel and octane in applications where the fuel being used is already taken to its kinetic maximum and there's no more alternative to prevent detonation.

[chod]

I was talking to a friend and he thought they could increase my compression ratios when I had my car tuned. That's why I was asking about meth vs nitrous with a higher compression ratio. I'm a noob and can't do much more than simple bolt ons right now. Thanks for the response. I'll steer clear of the meth injection until I'm able to go FI....whenever that is.