Help me design a carbon fiber intake manifold.

[Crazy_pilot]

Background: I'm taking a manufacturing/design program at school and am in my final year. Part of this year is a design/manufacturing project that encompasses the principles taught in the course. This can be anything from CNC machining, welding, tool design, composites, plant layout.... Very wide open.

My project is a carbon fiber intake manifold for the SVX. I may accompany this with a new cold air intake (also CF, of course). I've been doing some research, but by no means am I an expert in engine design, so I'm looking for advice and help with this project. I've got the basic dimensions down and am currently working on my design in CATIA.

In case anyone's wondering why carbon fiber? Lightweight for one, the OEM manifold is quite hefty. I should be able to trim it down to just a handful of pounds. Heat transfer is the second big thing though. I'll have to see what happens once it's installed, but I'm hoping that the CF will keep intake temperatures lower. It may heat soak faster due to the low mass, but once air is moving through it it should cool rapidly.

My questions at the moment:

1. It's too complex to incorporate the IRIS system into what I'm making given my time and ability constraints and this leaves me with the choice of a dual or single plenum system. Should I have the throttle body feeding a pair of smaller plenums, one for each cylinder bank, or should I have a single, larger plenum? The way I see it the dual plenums will have walls facing the runner inlets, given better reflection for resonance, but can the ECU read and compensate for the two banks possibly having slightly different airflow and fuel requirements?

2. Plenum volume? Most of the articles I've found relate to forced induction manifolds and suggest plenum volume be 1.5-2 times the engine displacement, but not many have anything to suggest volume for N/A engines. 0.75 times displacement?

3. Runner length? I'll be keeping the diameter to ~45mm I.D. and will be using raised velocity stacks/trumpets inside the plenum. I'd like to target ~6000 RPM for peak power to combat the EG33's tendency to fall off in the upper rev range. From what I've found so far I should be aiming for ~10" runners above the injector stacks.

Any other thoughts or comments are welcomed, this is going to be a challenging project but also a lot of fun.

Some of the references I've been reading:

http://www.amsperformance.com/pdfs/intakemani.pdf
http://www.velocity-of-sound.com/vel...alculator2.htm
http://horsepowercalculators.net/int...anifold-design

[StatGSR]

This article may or may not be relevant to your interests... and not its not purely honda related

http://www.team-integra.net/sections...?ArticleID=466

[Crazy_pilot]

I think I've come across that article before, it's a good description of the resonance tuning principal, which is what runner length is all about. The concepts are universal to all manifolds, so it's definitely going to be part of mine.

[icingdeath88]

Cool project. I'm just trying to imagine how it would look under the hood though. It's going to be a challenge to fit 10" runners with two separate plenums (pleni? lol) in the engine bay.

[Crazy_pilot]

Here's a very rough idea of how it's going to look. This was done before I pulled the intake off my car and took proper measurements, so a lot if going to change.



I'm going to have the flanges anodized gold to match the BBS wheels, along with the throttle body. Bling bling

[icingdeath88]

Looks good as long as it's low enough for the hood to close, lol. Are you going to be using the stock TB? How are you going do do the vacuum lines and whatnot?