It’s all about heat. Actually, it’s all about reducing heat as explained in the video below. Produced by AEM Performance Electronics to help you understand how to get more power out of your supercharged engine, the video shows how water/methanol injection cools the intake charge and combustion chamber.

With cooler operating temperatures, your engine can then be tuned for more power, or you could simply take the cooling benefit as is for more reliable operation.  Yeah right – we know that you’ll turn up the boost or timing in search of more power. So, it’s a good thing that their kit is well thought out and complete. While they also have kits for diesel engines, we’ll just be taking about gasoline engines here.

When intake air is compressed, its temperature increases. It’s a simple matter of physics and there’s nothing you can do to change that. So, we start by running the intake air through an intercooler and that helps reduce the temperature. A cooler intake charge means air that is more dense and that means it can be mixed with more gasoline for more power.

With an injection nozzle positioned before the throttle body and after the mass air flow sensor, a mixture of water and methanol is supplied and vaporized as it sprays into the intake pipe. Instead of having physics work against us, now it’s working for us, because the mixture takes away heat from the intake air. There are additional cooling effects as well as an octane bump from the methanol as the mixture reaches the combustion chamber and you can see how these affect the overall process by watching the video.

So, what happens when you run out of water/methanol mixture? That could go poorly, so its a good thing that the AEM fluid reservoir has a low level switch. This feeds into the supplied controller, which will take appropriate action when you run out so that engine damage is prevented. The electronics monitors boost pressure and increases the amount of mixture sent into the intake. If you’re using this setup for more than weekend warrior duty, there is an optional 5-gallon fluid reservoir available.

When you do need fail-safe performance, AEM has an add-on Injection Monitor that is highly programmable and can even reduce boost or switch tuning maps when a fault condition is detected. You may not want that level of sophistication if you’re a weekend warrior, but it’s also comforting to know that the company has products to protect you to that level.

We’d also like to say a big “Welcome” to AEM Performance Electronics, as they are hooking up big time with the powerTV web sites and have been around a long time delivering quality performance intake components. Be sure to scout out their web site and see what else is new.