Sullaha
Active member
This! And I've experimented on other bikes using a dyno, all the maths worked out, dead on.California Scientific
Motorcycles have had air boxes holding their air filters for decades. However, in the last couple of decades the purpose of these air boxes has changed quite dramatically.
Originally the air box was just there to keep flying dirt, rain, and bugs from directly hitting the air cleaner. They were simply an attempt to keep the air cleaner a little cleaner a little longer.
In the '70s, the US government started making noise regulations tighter. At some point, the manufacturers realized that the noise from the air intake was part of their problem. They started to look for ways to muffle not only the exhaust, but the intake roar too. Sound waves are pressure pulses in the air. Pistons pull in air on their intake stroke, creating a low pressure pulse in the air box. Then on the compression, power, and exhaust strokes the intake valve is closed and the air box is free to return to atmospheric pressure. These alternating low pressure and normal pressure pulses are sound waves. The manufacturers needed some way to dampen them out.
Your exhaust mufflers are made of a series of open chambers connected to each other by tubes. The exhaust pressure pulses get caught in the chambers and bounce around in them, then have to leak out relatively slowly through the tubes. The math that governs mufflers can also be applied to air boxes: you need a big chamber to hold a bunch of air, and an inlet tube to let air in at a controlled rate.
The air in a box is compressible, so a box is the acoustic analog of a capacitor or spring. Air has mass - about 1kg / cubic meter, about 2 pounds per cubic yard. In a tube, the air moves back and forth as a slug, as long as the frequency of the movement is small compared to (tube length / speed of sound). So, at low frequencies a tube is a mass term. Since the speed of sound is about 1000 feet per second, a foot long tube is equivalent to 1 khz. 10,000 rpm is 160 pulses per second on a V-Twin, so "low frequency" clearly applies on an air box for any snorkel shorter than about 6 feet long. A wire screen is the acoustic analog of a resistor. It slows air motion, converting the energy into heat. The combination of a box and tube is a system with a resonance. Exactly as a child's swing has a resonant frequency, exactly as a ported speaker enclosure has a resonant frequency, so does your air box.
A system at resonance is nearly perfect - there are small frictional losses in any system, but at resonance these are the only losses. Imagine pushing a child on a swing - it takes very little energy to keep her going at the natural frequency of the swing, just a little push each swing is enough. The only thing slowing her down is air resistance and a little friction in the chains. So at resonance, air flows through a tuned air box almost without resistance. This is as close as we can get to a superconductor of air.
A modern engine with valve overlap will naturally have a dip in the torque at about a third to a half the red line rpm. If the air box is tuned to have minimum resistance to air flow at this rpm, the dip in the torque curve will be partially filled in by the ease of pulling air into the engine.
So, your air box is most likely designed to add horsepower in the mid-range. The air box will have little or no effect on peak hp.
Years ago, before airboxes were designed as resonant systems, it used to be popular to cut additional holes in the air box to allow more air flow for high rpm. This is no longer a good idea. Modern air boxes can flow much more air than the engine will ever use. Modern engines have throttle bodies or carburetors with throats that are typically about 45mm in diameter, about 16 sq.cm in area. The inlet snorkel to a modern air box will be roughly 300 to 800 sq.cm - much larger than the throttle body or carburetor throat. The idea that the snorkel makes for a significant impediment to air flow into the engine is questionable at best. Drilling holes to let in more air is exactly equivalent to drilling holes in your speaker cabinets to let out more sound. Removing the snorkel from your air box is the exact same thing as removing the port in your speakers, the tube that's carefully engineered to have just the right diameter and length to reinforce the bass on your speakers at low frequencies. By altering your air box in any significant fashion, you're most likely going to cost yourself three to five hp in the mid range, and gain nothing measurable at high rpms