Water injection is one means of decreasing EGTs which hasn't been discussed much. Is there anybody who has run an Aquamist 1S system and what are the results?<br><br>Thanks

 

Bart,<br> I remember seeing an Aqua-mist injection system in Don Ramer's signature. He was with ATS Diesel Performance but I don't know how you could contact him now. You could probably contact ATS about this system or how to contact him. 1-(800) 949-6002.<br><br> Best Regards,<br> <br> Meacham Evins ??? ???

 

I dont recommend anyone run a water injection system for long durations or for daily use.<br><br>The piping from the intercooler is steel and the cylinder head/plenum area is made of cast iron. This will increase the amount of rust the cylinder head/plenum gets growing in there. This is not good for a long term solution to heat issues.<br><br>This rust, if it gets bad enough can cause premature engine wear from ingesting the fine particles of metal as they break away from the head/plenum and enter the cylinders. <br><br>Cummins service manuals caution when rebuilding if the head is rusted inside to remove all traces of rust in this area before re-installing the head.<br><br>Other may disagree, but I have seen the damage caused by this first hand. For racing/sled pulling application we are talking about a completly different thing. More power to that. In many cases with large staged turbos and crazy high boost numbers you have to use water to cool it all down.<br><br>Don~

 

[quote author=Don M link=board=7;threadid=16645;start=0#156908 date=1057447036]<br>I dont recommend anyone run a water injection system for long durations or for daily use.<br>[/quote]<br><br>Hey Don, what do you think the long term damage would be if a street driven truck only used water injection occasionally, say for weekend warrior type stuff? Would the daily driving during the week be hot enough to prevent any kind of fine rust buildup? Perhaps if the user were to run the truck fairly hard, bringing boost and EGTs up, without the water injection on after a run? Would this be enough to dissipate the water from the system? Or once the water hit steel, would slight oxidation begin occurring immediately?<br><br>Rod

 

We used to use water injection on our Race Sea Doo's to cool the pipe down and I can tell you first hand its hard on internals like Don said. Its also really hard on valves in 4 strokes. Its also had on rods as well its just not a thing you wanna play with unless you are prepared for the conciquences.

 

[quote author=Push Rod link=board=7;threadid=16645;start=0#156909 date=1057448152]<br>[quote author=Don M link=board=7;threadid=16645;start=0#156908 date=1057447036]<br>I dont recommend anyone run a water injection system for long durations or for daily use.<br>[/quote]<br><br>Hey Don, what do you think the long term damage would be if a street driven truck only used water injection occasionally, say for weekend warrior type stuff? Would the daily driving during the week be hot enough to prevent any kind of fine rust buildup? Perhaps if the user were to run the truck fairly hard, bringing boost and EGTs up, without the water injection on after a run? Would this be enough to dissipate the water from the system? Or once the water hit steel, would slight oxidation begin occurring immediately?<br><br>Rod<br>[/quote]<br><br><br>Man I dont know for certain. I have taken the intake off of my 12 valve and hosed a little water around that area to clean things up like grease or whatever and had that inside of the intake area rust up real fast. I did not run water into the manifold for certain, but a little splashed in and caused a rust build up. IMO, water injection for a daily driver is a no go. Course I do not know how most of us would cotton to the idea of having to wait for the water to condense away.<br><br>Im betting the heat of the engine alone is plenty to evap all traces of water in the cylinder head/plenum area. It mostly depends on how much you run and how often. <br>Small amounts of water in the face of the turbo will evap very fast. No traces of liquid in a nano second. <br><br>Who knows....I have built in water injection here in Dallas. The humidity <br><br>Don~<br><br>

 

As I understand it, water injection is quite common on diesels over in Europe. Don't know for sure, haven't been there.

The amount the Aquamist idealer is suggesting to inject is about 12 oz/min at full throttle. About 10 to 1 fuel to water is another figure mentioned. There is no power to be gained on diesels, just EGT reduction, so it would only have to be injected when needed.

The water is injected post intercooler, and from what I gather the Aquamist jets are excellent at vaporizing it. The pump is rated at 100 psi for most size jets.

They suggest using windshield washer fluid in the winter????

Thanks for replies, every one.

 

I may throw in my 2c here: <br>We used water injection on turbodiesels for increasing torque at WOT. This works quite nice for race engines. (You will have to break out the wrenches quite frequently).<br>The trick of water droplet injection is that you use the thermal energy available to evaporate water drolets during the power stroke. This will convert more heat into force on the piston and in consequence give you cooler EGTs and more torque. A major factor in this game is the size of the droplets. If they are too small they are evaporated before combustion, giving you only EGT benefits due to the evaporative cooling of the air. If you have droplets that are too big they will hit cylinder walls and piston tops with high velocities. <br>At the right droplet size the main part of the water will evaporate during the burn of the fuel. It is quite difficult to set up a system like this for engines like the CTD that have a high swirl rate under high boost situations, because centrifugal force tends to push out the water droplets and crash them into the cylinder wall. Also the presence of the small water droplets can change the effective timing by retarding the ignition of the main volume of the injected charge. We could overcome this problem partially by mixing the water with nitromethanol. <br>The corrosion factor was not much of an issue because we had a TBO of 2 hrs on these engines. Even there we noticed traces of rust on intake valve stems in some cases and on intakes if the head was made of iron. <br>Due to the concerns of droplet size we used a squential multipoint injection that followed the firing order to time the injection event to the intake stroke. <br><br>Stepping from my soapbox<br><br>AlpineRAM

 

Alpine, I was hoping you'd chime in. Is really true many diesels over there are using H2O injection?

 

I have used water injection on my truck for quite some time now will good results, it's not for everyday use it's for cooling of EGT's to the tune of 200 less, if you look at what I'm using for fuel then that will explain, water only adds about 5-6 psi of boost and you can barely feel it when it comes on, now add some methanol to it and it's a different ballgame. What I noticed was if I didn't add enough liquid when running methanol if would gain EGT's with the power, I shoot alot of liquid, more than an aquamist system can even think about. Van Hasiley told me this, when you run it on the truck make sure you idle it for a while to dry everything out to prevent the rust Don was talking about.<br><br>Jim

 

Hey Jim,<br><br>have you checked your compression or done a leakdown test lately. Im willing to bet that the water had taken a toll on the old 12 valve from Okie City?<br><br>Don~

 

Bart: It's true that a good portion of the racing diesels use water injection. The only other diesels that use it are in really big gensets, but they do direct water injection on a separate injector comparable to the diesel injection. In the racing application water injecion naturally has the problems mentioned like scuffing of pistons, lube film breakdown caused by high speed drop impact, spray erosion of surfaces etc. But it keeps from meltdowns and lolly pop exhaust valves. As I said these engines have a MTBO of 2 hrs. After 3 or 4 rebuilds these engines are scrap metal. <br>Some people think of water injection when they see the systems that are used to cool the intercooler by water spray. These do work extremely well if distilled water is used. <br><br>Jim: You could try and use nitromethanol-methanol-water mixture. I had very good results with 25-25-50. (Do so at your own risk ;D )I had rather fierce pressure gains with that. <br>It's quite logical that boost will not increase too rapidly with water injection because the turbine works on deltaP*deltaT, and if we reduce Tin on the turbine the slightly higher Pin will not compensate for all. What you can notice is that a: you can shove in more fuel without melting stuff, b: more torque for the same amount of fuel if all teh parameters are set corectly. The presence of water cools the charge in the cylinder and therefore retards the combustion event.It also slows the burn a bit and can therefore lead to higher residual pressures when the exhaust valve opens. <br><br>AlpineRAM

 

Don, I just did a compression test yesterday and need to bounce the numbers off Al@PDR as we were talking about blow-by. Water may very well take it's toll on the motor but I think that the worse toll is what I'm doing to it, at the power level I'm at and boost I'm at I believe is doing more damage than the water will, and running without it make me cringe at the 1900 degrees pre-turbo.<br><br>Jim

 

Jim seems to be one of the rare species where water injection will increase engine life ;D<br><br>Jim: What kind of evap. system do you run? Maybe your droplets are too small to achieve max. cooling effect. <br>Naurally you have to let the engine and exhaust run dry.<br><br>AlpineRAM

 

Jim,<br><br>What were your compression numbers? Mine were like 265 psi in all cylinders. This seemed kinda low to me so i checked with another guy who had nearly 400 psi ***?<br> <br>Looks like I have excessive wear going on in the shortblock. 4:10 gears and lots of hauling weight has finally killed the compression.<br><br>Don~