An exercise in overthinking - Junits15's street build

[Chris Barnes]

Mine was a simple setup. Procharger P1X on a 2018 GT A10 car. I ran Devils Own nozzles, Snow nozzle holders and an in-trunk tank that I wired to my windshield wiper reservoir sensor to alert me on the dash if the tank was low. Very simple system that just worked. Nothing near as complex as what you are working on. Mine was trial and error with settings. When I first started it was hitting too hard at low RPM and causing a misfire. Once I adjusted to match the boost curve it was really just fine tuning how quickly the pressure ramped up. I also moved my IAT sensor to the #8 manifold runner so my tuner could utilize. Our fuel in Arizona is horrific and we have no E85 stations to speak of unless you want E54. I beat the crap out of the car for three years on pump 91 and around 10psi and I never had a single issue. I routinely logged spark knock and fueling and it would see around 17 deg of advance and trying to add more. If memory serves, the timing cap was at 17 degrees. With proper setup and installation these WMI systems are a great alternative to E and offer the added benefit of lower IAT's. Im a believer since prior to the WMI system the car would encounter knock at only 13 deg of advance at a lower 8psi boost pressure. Also, we never tuned any of the fuel out at WOT. Instead just let the STFT's do their thing.

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[junits15]

Mine was a simple setup. Procharger P1X on a 2018 GT A10 car. I ran Devils Own nozzles, Snow nozzle holders and an in-trunk tank that I wired to my windshield wiper reservoir sensor to alert me on the dash if the tank was low. Very simple system that just worked. Nothing near as complex as what you are working on. Mine was trial and error with settings. When I first started it was hitting too hard at low RPM and causing a misfire. Once I adjusted to match the boost curve it was really just fine tuning how quickly the pressure ramped up. I also moved my IAT sensor to the #8 manifold runner so my tuner could utilize. Our fuel in Arizona is horrific and we have no E85 stations to speak of unless you want E54. I beat the crap out of the car for three years on pump 91 and around 10psi and I never had a single issue. I routinely logged spark knock and fueling and it would see around 17 deg of advance and trying to add more. If memory serves, the timing cap was at 17 degrees. With proper setup and installation these WMI systems are a great alternative to E and offer the added benefit of lower IAT's. Im a believer since prior to the WMI system the car would encounter knock at only 13 deg of advance at a lower 8psi boost pressure. Also, we never tuned any of the fuel out at WOT. Instead just let the STFT's do their thing.

Oh that's that really nice alky control tank, I like that one a lot, it fits in a battery tray for race only applications.

Its interesting that you mention that it was hitting too hard down low, how low? Because I'm currently hitting with 100% pump duty and 100% solenoid at 2500 RPM with no issues so far, which is making me think I don't quite have this controller understood lol. You had more nozzle than me, but I'm pretty sure I should be able to bog this thing down.

 

[junits15]

Car pee

Testing the system while stationary, appears to all be working! This thoroughly confused all the people walking around the parking lot of my apartment complex lol.

I also verified that it does spray through the nozzles.

This testing also showed that the snow solenoid I’m using doesn’t respond to PWM duty cycles greater than 50% very well, basically if you’re going to set it higher than 50% you might as well set it to 100%. It’s simply not fast enough for this application. There are industrial valves that work better for this but they are expensive and really overkill for this. I can get the same result by just adjusting pump duty.

I honestly didn’t expect the solenoid to work well pulsed, it’s audibly slow to react.


So I’ve confirmed it is spraying, which is good! The Syvecs WMI controller is also accurately measuring the flow meter, so I know WM is flowing while driving.


Now the scary question is, is it actually possible to get more knock suppression? Because as it sits right now the logs aren’t showing enough of an improvement for my tastes. It’s definitely better than 93, which is good and means it’s making some additional power, I was just really hoping to max out the timing.

I checked some logs I have:

87<93
93<93+WMI 50/50
93+WMI 50/50<octane booster/e85

 

[Chris Barnes]

Oh that's that really nice alky control tank, I like that one a lot, it fits in a battery tray for race only applications.

Its interesting that you mention that it was hitting too hard down low, how low? Because I'm currently hitting with 100% pump duty and 100% solenoid at 2500 RPM with no issues so far, which is making me think I don't quite have this controller understood lol. You had more nozzle than me, but I'm pretty sure I should be able to bog this thing down.

I don't recall what RPM I was having misfires at, but it was when the car was only making like 2lbs of boost. I simply had the gain of Alky system coming in too fast. I had the meth spraying starting at around 2psi and was full tilt by 5-6 psi. I found the sooner you could start spraying the better the knock reduction worked. Again, it was a bit of trial and error but was easy to figure out by simply looking at WOT logs. I'm actually contemplating putting an Akly system on my 2021 GT500 to see how it works once I pulley down.

 

[junits15]

I don't recall what RPM I was having misfires at, but it was when the car was only making like 2lbs of boost. I simply had the gain of Alky system coming in too fast. I had the meth spraying starting at around 2psi and was full tilt by 5-6 psi. I found the sooner you could start spraying the better the knock reduction worked. Again, it was a bit of trial and error but was easy to figure out by simply looking at WOT logs. I'm actually contemplating putting an Akly system on my 2021 GT500 to see how it works once I pulley down.

Interesting, what's throwing me for a loop is that you were having misfires on a boosted setup and I can't even get the engine to misfire on an N/A setup.

Thanks for the response!

 

[junits15]

So I've done some more testing, I dumped a bottle of Heet into a mostly empty tank, so that should be a pretty high methanol content mixture, and I saw no difference at all.

Something is not right, I'm seeing almost no effect at all, not on knock, fuel trims, or even misfires. I have the system programmed to come on at 2500RPM full blast, that should bog down the motor.

Here is a datalog from someone else I know, 2.0L ecoboost with WMI, an a 8gal/hr nozzle and a turbo upgrade:
https://datazap.me/u/junits15/robs-st-wmi-final-fuel-tuning-applied?log=0&data=5-7-11-25

If we enable STFT% and airflow mass in the datazap log, we see that at the end of the pull the fuel trims are 25% negative. This is a 2.0L boosted engine, with a 500cc/min (8 gal/hr) nozzle. The whole argument of if this is worth it on N/A over boosted falls away here, this log shows that with less airflow mass than a stock coyote, there are impacts to fuel trims with nearly the same nozzle capacity as I have.
He's flowing 380 lbs/min of air at redline and seeing -25% with a 8 gal/hr nozzle
I flow 460 lbs/min at redline and have 10 gal/hr of nozzle, so i would expect to see something similar to -25% fuel trim at redline.

My reasoning is that I have 20% more airflow and 20% more nozzle, it should have an impact.

Something is up here and I don't know what, I need to spend more time testing the setup, I also think I should remove the spacer and verify that it actually sprays through the nozzles. Perhaps these snow nozzles are the issue? Tough to say, but I'm pretty sure I should be able to see something.

 

[junits15]

The gasoline fuel flow at redline is approximately 230lb/hr

I'm using 10 gal/hr of nozzles

1 gallon of 50/50 WM is 7.5lbs, so the 10 gal/hr nozzles will spray 75 lbs/hr of WM 5050, which is 42 lbs/hr of water and 33 lbs/hr of methanol.

The methanol is the only thing that effects fueling, so 33 lbs/hr divided by 230 lbs/hr is 14% methanol by fuel volume.

But the stoich ratio of methanol is 6.5:1 and gasoline is 14.01:1, with a 14%/86% methanol to e10 gasoline mixture, the stoic ratio is 13.5:1 of the mixture.

13.5/14.01 = 96%, so there is only 4% unaccounted for fuel volume that the trims need to take up. This makes sense and its what I'm seeing.

 

[junits15]

however at 4500 RPM:

fuel flow is 170lbs/min

WM 50/50 flow is the same, 75 lbs/min, 42 lbs/min of water 33 lbs/min of methanol, that's 20% methanol by weight with respect to the commanded gasoline fuel flow.

(.2* 6.5) + (.8 * 14.01) = 12.05

12.05/14.01 = 89% so in that scenario we have 11% unaccounted for fuel. And at point in the pull I'm seeing +2% fuel.

Something is up that should be detectable.

 

[junits15]

A test would be to try 100% methanol (terrifying) and see if that makes a difference. Or even easier and safer would be to command the solenoid open and the pump to 10% at idle, that should be really easy to detect.

That will tell me if the spray is actually getting into the motor or not.

I think it just needs more nozzle to be honest.

 

[junits15]

oh baby here we fuckin GO

So I burned down the whole tank of 50/50 boost juice, feeling defeated and thinking it wouldn't work. On a whim i dumped in about a 1/3 gallon of blue washer fluid and a bottle of heet. I also tweaked the WOT lambda to be .80 from .82 (11.2:1 from 11.5:1).

Took it for a rip and was able to make the damn thing misfire lol, a massive difference pretty much immediately as soon as the fluid cleared the lines. The real win though is this graph!

Pull with meth^


We are slammed up against MBT pretty much as soon as the KR will allow us! This is a massive improvement! Not one knock in this pull at all. I will need to do some investigating, as I'm not sure what methanol concentration is in the tank and clearly I need to dial back the meth spray to prevent misfires.

This is good, this is really good.

 

[junits15]

I switched to a larger nozzle total nozzle is now 21gph, massively overkill I think 15 would be all we really need but it seems to be working.


I’ve verified that if you slam the WMI to 50% duty at 2k rpm with this nozzle setup you’ll ride mbt and also misfire. So now I’m dialing up the solenoid duty slowly 5% at a time to find what different parts of the rpm range need to hit mbt.


I broke one of my 5gph nozzles :( thankfully the screw extractior worked on both ends lol

Replaced a leaky hose bad hose shown below

Good hose installed

 

[rxryanm]

Love reading the stream of consciousness above. Super interesting.

• more meth

KY born and raised, this is always the answer.

 

[junits15]

Love reading the stream of consciousness above. Super interesting.



KY born and raised, this is always the answer.

Thank you! I find that a lot of builds leave out the pitfalls and hard parts, I like to include them because it may be useful to someone else later. Hence the extremely detailed stream of consciousness type writing.

If I explain all of the way this failed before succeeding, then it makes it really easy to avoid later. A methanol injection setup is so unheard of on an N/A car, this is literally the first time a lot of this stuff is documented at all. More details more better I think.

 

[junits15]

X pipe

This sounds great, love the tone

 

[junits15]

I cut the center muffler a bit shorter than the x pipe by accident, so the longer x pipe pushed the rear mufflers back. This caused the passenger side exhaust valve actuator wires to jam into a pinch weld. Eventually wearing through the insulation, shorting to ground, and giving the “exhaust mode selection not available” error.

I cut another half inch off the x pipe on both sides re-adjusted and now it’s good.

before:

after:

and a glamor shot

And my old girl

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