Experimenting with Intake Air Temp. Request for comments.

Sh0velMan

Depends entirely on ambient temp and how long the car sat and sucked in heated air. Sitting in traffic, I'd see 160+ degree air and it didn't matter how much I drove after that, unless I was doing WOT pulls one after another, temps would never get back down to ambient (100ish), they'd just hover around 130.

Plastic doesn't conduct heat worth a damn, even if they do heat up, they won't transfer much of that heat into the air in normal use. Again, if you're idling for a long time, it'll heat, but I'd expect your temps to return to something like 'normal' relatively quickly.

So, generally speaking:

Shiny = Reflects IR
Black = Absorbs IR

Gold is one of the best reflectors for IR, 'swhy satellites and whatnot are covered in it and why DEI's radiant heat protectant products are all gold.

If the major heat sources in the engine bay are already shielded, I could see why they'd use black.

GTM shields their manifolds (and perhaps turbines?) already, so radiant heat is less of an issue, so they'd run black because that will help move heat out of the hotter charge air into the cooler ambient air. It's all relative and all comes down to heat gradients. Heat moves from one place to another, if you understand what I mean.

Think of the Light/Dark paradigm, darkness is the absence of light, cold is the absence of heat.

So yeah, tangents aside, they'd use black so that heat is transferred through the charge pipe into the atmosphere rather than hanging out in the charge air and going into the engine.

Every little bit helps!

Also note that we are talking about two different things here. Radiant heat can be shielded against, convective heat can only be handled by replacing that heated air with fresh, cool air or by insulating what you want to protect.

This is why I have my intakes wrapped in both header wrap (for insulation) and DEI reflect-a-gold for radiant protection. (I have un-wrapped headers at present, they heat everything up, on the list for this season to get those taken care of)

Wow. This got long, quick.

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