Propickup Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/94279
MPG-MAXINSTALL by Tim Walton COOL MPG GAINS D on't tell James, the owner of our test truck, but we did enough hill climbs with his Cummins powered Dodge RAM and 44-foot trailer to get the brakes smoking. We were The methanol/ water injection kit comes with the controller and all the tubing, nozzles and needed hard- ware to install. testing the EGT handling capa- bilities of the MPG-MAX water/ methanol injection system by Snow Performance. The system did a great job of keeping the EGTs down. Now we need to upgrade the trailer brake controller before moving on to mileage testing. If you're thinking water and diesel don't mix, I get that. In fact, water separators and fuel contamination has been part of our vocabulary for a long time. But the idea of includ- ing water in the diesel goes all the way back to Rudolf Diesel, who recognized the benefi ts of water injection in diesel com- bustion as a way to get more useable work out of the heat of combustion. "Just as turbocharging is a way to scavenge normally wasted energy, water injection is used for the steam eff ect in combustion where additional torque is produced as the water droplets go from liquid to vapor, " says Matt Snow. In addition to this steam eff ect, methanol itself is fuel, so it burns in the process. The injections also contribute to combustion conditioning, resulting in smaller diesel drop- lets, greater surface area and more effi cient fuel burn during the combustion event. The advanced design of the MPG-MAX unit, which includes three injection nozzles, uses signifi cantly more water (or water/methanol mix) than systems designed only for power delivery. The diff erence is that the Snow system uses a smaller nozzle to delivering a mist of the cooling liquid at a wider range of boost levels. This means the larger water tank we installed in the bed is a must. Other kits can get away with a smaller tank mounted in the engine bay or fenders. Because of this, the install involves a bit more plumbing, but the gains are worth it. Because our test pickup Snow Performance MPG-MAX water/methanol injection. 34 PROPICKUP December 2012