Stock Intake snorkel and sealed intakes - How restrictive is it??

[Boosted71]

Just to clarify for many people that are weary about how restrictive the stock intake snorkel is, I decided to do some basic math and find out the difference in cross sectional area as compared to the diameter of many aftermarket intake tubes.
For my example, I am using an Airaid sealed intake system with a diameter of 106mm with the restrictor removed. Jlt is similar in diameter(110mm I believe) Finding the area converted into inches that gives us roughly 13.6 in^2.
Now for the tricky part. In order to get a rough estimate of the cross sectional area of the intake snorkel, I had to break apart the irregular shape into sections and find the area of those shapes. I wish I had a more accurate way to do this but I dont have any fancy 3d scanning tools and what not. So to keep the story short, I measured the shapes as best I could and came up with a cross sectional area of roughly 12.9 in^2.
In comparing the stock shape of the snorkel to a common size intake tube of 106mm (which is probably already a bit overkill) the difference is only about 5%.
So in conclusion, for any people that state that the snorkel is a huge restriction is misinformed. Once again, we are talking about a 5% difference here which is very minimal. Also, that is not taking into account that the 106mm intake tube is downstream of the air filter which will cause the velocity and pressure of air to drop accordingly. Pretty much making the difference in capable flow of the 2 different areas pretty much the same. If not the other way around.
My reasoning is that a well designed sealed intake system should still be a viable option for many s550 owners. Not only is the snorkel not as restrictive as many believe, but the benefits of grabbing only cold air should help substantially. When paired with something like the Velossa Tech ram air piece, I think the results will be just as good or better than an open air intake in the real world.
But thats just my 2 cents

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[GTBOB]

For what it's worth, my former INJEN EVO closed box intake (with the insert removed) was showing the same maf counts (airflow the ecu is reading) as an open filter JLT intake. If I was to overlay the maf readings from each system on a graph, they would look the same.

 

[RomanB]

The stock intake and tube work great. Take the volume of the helmholz resonator and add it to the tube. The resonators do more then just quiet the intake tract. Without helmoltz resonators the intake tube has to be HUGE to be able to flow as much because incoming air is fighting air that makes a 180 after it hits a closed intake valve. Intake noise sounds awesome, but in reality it is just the air that went into the engine going back out.

The reason why people started talking about the stock snorkel being a restrislction was when a certain producer of CAIs flow benched it the rubber gasket started to collapse while moving around 370hp worth of air. In reality that rubber gasket slips over the metal opening in the grill and in real life/ in the car it won't collapse or lose its shape.

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