Mailing List lml@lancaironline.net Message #26201
From: Andreas Christou <andreas@x-jets.com>
Sender: Marvin Kaye <marv@lancaironline.net>
Subject: Re: [LML] Re: Plenum Cooling
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 23:21:55 -0400
To: <lml@lancaironline.net>
At 09:53 PM 10/19/04, you wrote:
I am certainly no expert but I think the Bernoulli principle (an expanding stream of air shows a reduction in velocity and an increase in pressure and vice versa) applies if the expansion is generally non-turbulent, which happens if the rate of expansion is around 5 degrees or less.  In my Legacy with a Lycoming engine, air intake on both sides was turbulent.  On the left much more on the right because the baffling angle is much steeper to accommodate an oil cooler (which we installed elsewhere.)  It is fairly clear that no one did any airflow engineering on the intakes.  We got some significant temperature reductions (about 35 degrees CHT) from making some minor alterations to the right side baffling (basically putting in a small ramp that blocked about an inch of the #1 cylinder), installing about a 4" deep cone on the left intake and a deflector to direct left intake air down toward the #2 cylinder.

The problem of air cooled engine cooling was given a great deal of attention by NACA in the years preceding WWII. Those early reports paid specific attention to air cooled radial engine cylinders and how to baffle for minimum drag losses. I found the reports on the NACA report server at http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/
I found this site to be a very useful source of information when designing a plenum based system for my Varieze. The same concepts were used  to build a very successful plenum system for a Lancair 360. Subsequently, two articles were written for the canard community and these can be found at http://x-jets.com/a_cooling_efficiency.html and at http://x-jets.com/a_downdraft_cooling.html .

You may find these articles informative. I gained 15 kts and lowered my CHT's by 70F.

Andreas

Andreas P. Christou
Cell:(203) 470 7334
andreas@x-jets.com
http://x-jets.com/
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