Works4me, your twin-charged MINI will be a beast with that front mounted IC!

Notes on your IAT----Ummmm you motor's not even warmed up yet and yer likely off throttle/coasting at like 1700 rpm in 6th.

Jeremy

 

Thank you all for your kind comments.

It will be definitely interesting to see how the FMIC manages the extra heat from the Turbo. Before I added the Turbo, the top-mount GRS was good enough to avoid heatsoak even after a full summer day at the track.

I know that the Water/Meth systems are all the rage right now. But I've experimented with them a bit and I'm not totally convinced that the cost/complexity/weight/benefit works out in their favor *for my application*.

If I can get back to the point where the Intercooler manages the load all by itself, that's definitely the simplest & most efficient solution. That, combined with the fact that I will be mostly running race gas (100+ octane), and all of the internals of the engine are coated, should give me a good performance & safety margin....but we'll see.

Heh. I guess you could say I'm really following the motto: "In for a Penny, in for a Pound".

 

Not much info to report this week; Joel discovered the Cat was plugged so they're redoing the exhaust with an ultra-efficient one-cell Cat .

But in the mean time, we spent some time today working on trimming the hood to fit the intercooler pipes. It really is a shame to hide them....hmmm.....perhaps a bit of creative cutting is in order:











I also trimmed & fitted the new floorboards:

 

That scoop looks cool with the cut outs . Is the hood not shut?

I love the idea but it really looks like half the cooler is blocked? I'm sure Gram had his reasons for the shape but with your aero bumper it kinda a bummer your can't use that whole big opening in the lower grill for the cooler.

You might get a little more pressure drop with a wider lower cooler but for your app the pressure drop don't matter. But the possibility of lower temps is interesting.

Can't wait till your next track vid.

Longboard

 

The hood is closed. But the bumper is just temporarily attached, so there's a gap between it & the hood.

Actually the Aero skirt provides less obstruction than the normal skirt. Most of the obstruction is by the metal bumper itself. One thing we're going to do to help the air flow is to add dams in the lower portion to help direct the air to the Intercooler.

And there are plenty of potential ways to increase the flow over the whole area, if necessary. It helps that there is a bit of a gap between the bumper and intercooler, so air can still flow to the full surface area.

As far as the performance, my only information so far is qualitiative. And that's simply that every time we run the car the output side of the Intercooler gets **cold**.

More info to come!

 

No performance data yet, but here's a brief video to give you a better idea of how it sounds (sorry for the shaking!). For the moment we're leaving the mufflers off as an experiment. It's loud but not as loud as you'd think; the turbo actually helps muffle the sound:



Subtle, eh?

And using the on-line utility DaveC found, I put together this crude fluid dynamics simulation movie of a dual-element rear wing design I'm thinking of using:



Queue evil laugh:

Ahahahahahahahahahaha!

 

Dude I love the sound of the open downpipe on the turbo

 

Sounds pretty sweet

 

im in love with your car.

thanks for the updates


What did you do to plug the roof?

 

Very interesting setup. Can't wait for some final numbers.

 

FMIC looks ace... but then I would say that!... love the way you've cut the scoop, might have to try that on mine.

 

on the track with this setup people infront of you are technically people behind you, so they'll know to move out of the way, so don't worry

 

Wow, thats all i can say. What kit is that??

 

Any updates?

 

Sorry I have not updated this thread recently. Progress slowed down a bit since the local shop I was working with (BHS) closed. So now I'm doing everything on the car myself. Plus I've been overwhelmed with my business & haven't had much spare time to do writeups & such.

However, I have been making good progress & I'm having fun buying cool tools (e.g. hand-held dual trace oscilloscope, micro-puncture probes) & learning all the details of configuring and programming the MoteC system. I plan on posting more information on my experiences and techniques when I have a bit more time. Given the dearth of information on using something like the Motec with a Mini, I think that might be useful to some people. Plus, some of the things I'm doing are pretty extreme (e.g. boost control + supercharter/turbo combo, dual surface adjustable wing, etc.).

Stay tuned!

 

Glad to hear your still hittin it man and expanding rather than being happy with what you got!! How's the turbo doing? Still going strong? I miss my baby... What boost are you running as of now?

 

Any updates?

LB

 

Yes we want more track videos!!!!

 

Looks great!!! Keep up the good work. What twincaharge kit did that start out as? Helix?

 

All,

Thanks for the continued interest.

July/August are not very enjoyable for track events in Texas, so I'm using the time to improve the ECU program and systematically stress test the whole system before attending track events in September. I've also been reading as much as I can about advanced tuning techniques - especially for twin charge systems. FYI here are three great books I've found:

How to Tune and Modify Engine Management Systems by Jeff Hartman, Motorbooks Workshop.

Dyno Testing and Tuning by Harold Bettes, SA Design

Engine Management Advanced Tuning by Greg Banish, SA Design


One of my key hopes is to avoid some of the issues that have hit other highly customized Minis. In my opinion, a big challenge with tuning these engines comes from the inherent difficulty in tuning a small forced air engine for all the extreme environmental variations (summer/winter hot/cold dry/humid, altitude variations, etc.) - especially if you're trying to do it all in a single tuning session. What complicates this even more are the small but significant differences between running the car on a dyno vs. on the road/track.

So my approach is twofold: 1) capture as much real-time, real-world information as possible (including weather conditions) , and 2) develop techniques for using this data to quickly and precisely adjust the tuning maps to match the real-world conditions.

To achieve this the engine has a large number of sensors installed. Three of the most important are the wideband Lambda, EGT, and knock sensor. The Lambda is the most important way to check the fuel maps. And the EGT and knock sensors are critical for adjusting the timing, as well as providing key indicators for other potential issues.

Getting the Lambda & EGT working was easy with off-the-shelf parts, but no such luck with the knock sensor. It requires a bandpass amplifier tuned to match the specific engine configuration. I'm working on designing my own DAC-based circuit for this, but in the mean time I found an aftermarket box that seems to be working well. It appears as the small circuit board at the bottom of the wires below (fyi the wiring in this picture looks worse than it does in real life...and I'm working on simplifying it)



Since the main tuning map is a function of RPM and MAP, I created three graphs corresponding to the instantaneous values of these sensors at each RPM/MAP point. The value at each point is represented by a color-coded dot. The color coding is structured to make problem areas visibly stand out. These graphs are automatically generated from the logged sensor data. So after each run I can immediately see where the maps need to be adjusted (FYI these are rather old screen shots from early testing; I'll try to post better examples next week). Or in the case of the knock map, any visible points indicate at which RPM/MAP a knock event occurred.






To further enhance the ability to capture & edit the settings, I mounted an additional embedded Windows XP computer in the car permanently connected to the ECU and GPS logger. This also enables the use of low-cost USB-based cameras for video recording. And by attaching a USB WIFI dongle, I can now tune the car wirelessly from a laptop (as well as watching the video wirelessly in real time ):





FYI, here's what the engine bay currently looks like:




I'll try to give more frequent updates as I progress...

 

Very nice work. Looks like your doing your homework. Continued luck with your project.

 

There is a bunch of us scheduled for the TDE event September 12th & 13th at MSR. Should be at least 10 MINIs. Come on up and show off the latest version of the beast.

Alan

 

lol love the clips... your car makes me laugh how reeedonks it is hahaha i love it.... i wish my car sounded like that

 

great stuff. love reading

 

I took the car to a local track yesterday for a test and tune day. It was a good day. I made some good progress on refining the overall tune, and it was a good chance to test the reliability and durability of the engine, wiring & other systems in car.

I have two data views that I tend to focus on. One shows the overall behavior of the engine: inputs (throttle), lead to state (RPM & MAP), controls (Injectior %, Timing), and output (Lambda, EGT, Knock). The other view graphs Lambda and EGT vs. RPM & MAP.

My overall approach is to start with a rich mixture, test the various dynamic conditions encountered and get a *consistent* behavior across the board. Then I'm leaning it out from there to within a confort zone of heat/knock that I think is reliable for the track. I'll repeat this process throughout the year & adjust the environmental factors (i.e. temp correction tables) to maintain that optimal behavior.

I'm by no means finished with the initial setup, but I made some very good progress. For example, here are the graphs for early in the day:





Note that the EGTs are getting a bit too hot. From this I tweaked the timing on higher boost sections of the graph and reduced the fuel a bit more. This helped cut down the EGTs and yet already started improving the power significantly:








There are still a number of things I need to work on - both in the tune & on the car itself. Right now the knock sensor is going off the minute the waste gate opens (it makes a *lot* of noise). Also, the waste gate is opening to early; the boost controller settings aren't properly set. Finally, I was going to measure the actual HP and Torque via the AIM data logger, but it had problems getting a satellite lock. I think it's an issue with the antenna...

Nevertheless, it was a good day. The car felt rock-solid reliable. And I made good progress on the tune without destroying anything in the process. I figure one more Test & Tune day & I'll be ready for a bigger track event...

FYI, here's a rather boring video of one of the runs. But it gives you a small sense of the amazing sound this thing produces:



I had more than one person comment that they could hear me coming up behind them before they even saw the car