Thanks for the responses about cooling fuel. I hadn't
heard about it being used in drag racing.
My original thinking came about as follows:
Everyone knows that dense air gives more power
(supercharging, ducting cold air from outside the
car...). However, cooling air below ambient is
going to be rather difficult in a road car.
However, by using a heat exchanger and one or
two peltier-effect heat pumps, one could quite
easily lower the temp of the fuel by 20--30K.
Well, that's about as far as I got. Myself and
a couple of the other engineers here spent an
afternoon looking at tables of physical constants
for fuel and air and digging out the high-school
physics but came to no fundamental conclusion.
I'd be interested if anyone knows more about
engine physics and could perhaps come up with
a quantitive relationship between the fuel
temperature and HP (assuming appropriate mixture
adjustment).
David.
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