Air Vents or Bonnet Scoops?

["Aaron Leung" <Aaron.Leung@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,
 
Sounds like I didn't explain my previous posting too well. I'll try to
explain the situation a bit better here by giving you a bit of
background on where everything is and how the airflow works.
 
The air filter is positioned near the left fog light so it can get
plenty of cold air. It's well away from the engine and is one of the
coolest areas in the engine bay. You can't see it in the pictures (
www.modifiedcars.com <http://www.modifiedcars.com> ), as it's too far
low.
 
The air flow we have is, cold air goes into the air filter, turns warm
at the supercharger, cools down at the intercooler, and then gets warm
again at the heat soaked pipes going into the engine. We're going to
cool this last pipe. We're thinking of insulating the pipe to help
shield it from the heat.
 
What I wanted to do was try to cool down the supercharger and engine
more, so the heat soak would not be as bad and the air density coming
out of the supercharger would be higher. I found out yesterday, the
supercharger is warm because it uses the engine oil to stay lubricated.
I've already got an reasonably large oil cooler to try and keep the oil
temps low. What I want to add is a bonnet vent or scoop to dissipate the
heat and I'm not sure what kind of effect it would have with the airflow
coming in and going out of the engine bay.

I spoke to my mechanic about putting in air vents or bonnet scopes and
he said it was a tricky subject, as the engineers have designed the air
flow to work in a specific way for the car. He commented that putting in
air vents or scopes may improve or disrupt the air flow patterns to cool
the overall tempreatures of the engine (top and bottom).
 
I'm not too sure what to do and I would like to ask for your advice from
the BMW community. Any thoughts and ideas would be much appreciated.
 
Cheers,
Aaron Leung
93 E36 (240bhp) 318 Supercharged
Sydney, Australia

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