Can Certain Performance Air Intakes Decrease Power? - Fact Or Fiction

Hmm, very interesting. Short ram is only good for low in, but bad for high end.... Too bad we don't have any long tube design for our car. I guess those of us with stock boxes will reconsider.
 
I remember when manufacturers used to go to great lengths to ensure a laminar flow over the maf sensor itself, screens were common back when they first appeared, but now a days the manufacturers instead design into there intake tract a situation that ensures laminar air flow over the sensor with improved tract & housing designs & eliminate the need for a screen which causes it's own restriction... I'd def agree that some aftermarket products do not go through anywhere near the amount of testing & R&D as an OEM, so yeah, sometimes something that in theory should be better can actually be worse because of unaccounted for differences such as this... that's one reason why I never even bothered with a CAI myself... many times the factory stuff is not such a limiting factor with everything else remaining factory, & to just stick a CAI on my fx would be for only one reason, to make the intake louder... that's about it... now as other mods are done to increase the VE of the engine itself, then stuff like a CAI will start to make more of a difference & start to become a benefit of more than just the psychological type...
 
Test 4, +11hp over stock:
impp_1007_19_o+installed+AEM_cold_air_intake.jpg

The most brutally hard to reach (also best performing) filter location I've tested so far: Filter in the fender, 3" ID tubing, MAF sensor in stock location.
newfilterlocation.jpg

I very much agree with their results. I have since moved my filter back to it's original (Stillen CAI) location due to the difficult access but while it was down in the fender it felt faster in the higher rpm range. I had two issues with the location; First, it is an even more punishing environment than the Stillen location in terms of rain water and road grime, which is the opposite of my original goal. Second, as I mentioned above, it pretty much requires removing the bumper to change the filter, though this could certainly be resolved by using a different filter...
 
Yikes.... that looks like a pain in the ass to access. My old comptech intake had a design where the sri portion was enclosed in a box with a giant tube that lead to the bumper from the box. To clean the filter, all you had to do was open the box up, but i suppose it's still a SRI in design.
 
velocity stack helps straighten the airflow which allows the ecu to have a more accurate reading of actual air ingested to the engine, meaning a more accurate matching of fuel, so then yeah, you benefit from the higher air flow... the whole point of this is that JUST increasing airflow itself is not enough to make more power if the ecu cannot accurately measure the airflow anymore... the mass air flow meter can only measure the surface area of a small fraction of its total opening, & this tiny sample needs to be representative of the total airflow for the reading to be of use so it assumes an even flow throughout the whole maf opening, law of averages... anything that disturbs that, say forcing extra air on the sides where it will not be measured or forcing extra flow at the actual small sample area making the ecu think there is more flow than actual... either one of those situations will skew the ecu's attempt at precise metering of fuel:air & negate any otherwise potential gains... a custom tune can somewhat compensate for this & many tuners will think that they are just correcting a deficiency in factory metering, where in reality there just compensating for a skewed MAF reading to begin with... the truth is that with a proper MAF setup, the ecu itself "should" be able to compensate for the addl air flow & match fuel to it... many times a custom tune is really done to correct errors like this, sometimes without the tuner even being fully aware of why he needs to alter the maps as he does... his whole target though is strictly AFR, so in essence he can correct this situation, but it may not have even been a situation had this problem not been caused to begin with...
 
Well hopefully I have some gains from the CAI & considering TS knows what they're doing. I did gain overall, but it's good to know that every part added is going to perform rather that some sort of loss
 
something like a TS tune can compensate & correct for this though, particularly & especially if it was a tune that was done on the vehicle itself, instead of just a can'd tune.. once your tuning anyway then this is much less of an issue... the losses there talking about are assuming no correction for this situation threw any kind of addl tuning
 
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