Friday, August 18, 2006

Water injection

I was pointed towards an interesting article written by AutoSpeed about water injection by one of the guys on the Dutch Maserati Club web forum.

I've been toying with the idea of using water injection on my Ghibli for some time, as I've described in a previous post. I actually discussed this topic with Jorrit at Auto Forza last week... he's always been a bit anti water injection, since he says it's curing the symptoms and not the cause of the problem. He's right... the problem is predominantly related to charge temperature and if good sized, efficient intercoolers are utilised that are located in at the front of the car with plenty of airflow potential across them, then a water injection system should become pretty redundent.

However, the problem with the Ghibli is that the intercoolers are pretty small, not particularly efficient and not particularly well located with respecto to air flow. Redesigning the intercoolers is not an easy task... even the likes of Modena Performance resort to only slightly increasing the size of the intercoolers and directing a bit more air across them, rather than installing a large single intercooler across the entire front of the car. So my dirver to go down the water injection route is that I think it will yield more "bang for buck" (please excuse the Americanism) than changing out the intercoolers.

I don't think just installing water injection alone will increase power though. What I do think it will enable is greater inlet pressures to be run.

As I've hinted in my previous post, I think this winter I'll purchase the kit and get it installed while my car is off the road. Once the injection system is installed and running OK, I'll then start to slowly increase the boost pressure and see what happens!


Here's quite an interesting story of a mad baron who fitted an Aquamist system to a Maserati Qattroporte... it's quite inspiring I find!

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