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Hi all, well been stuck with only a few hours here and there to get on, so progress has been slow. I have all the airflow stuff and comparison data to come back too, and will do in due course. I have, however, been working on F50 and the various issues to get it sorted - rebuilt the turbo with a new turbine, increased the axial clearance etc (stayed with the Super 57 trim comp wheel than dropping down to a 50 trim after much consideration), and now have that sorted as it boosts like a scolded cat - will detail in my F50 project thread. Then moved on to a D502 ecu that was cutting the fueling on boost above 1 bar, and then injector drive circuit issues on the old Renix phase 2 board kept me busy and hunting for a while. Thanks to both Tommy and Roman (yes a blast from the past... and more on that later, as Roman's mega sequential turbo beast is real I have the proof...some folk chased the gentleman off this site... fool them... as it's running Motec etc etc and very serious bit of kit... anyway I digress) I was able to sort these one by one. Thanks too go to Philippe (MacFly) for working on the Fenix viewer compatibility with the D502 ecu as well, so that I could get the real ignition and injection timing out. Some of this I'll likely put up on my Renix ECU project thread, but later when I'm done. But having addressed all of these I was still getting hesitation as the boost swung from 1 bar round to 1.x bar, and further only present around peak torque, so started thinking about ignition and the rather fragile capability / capacity we have in the Renix system and single coil pack module... I have yet to put this to practical test in the car, but I thought I would let you into some of the experiments I have been doing on the bench.
So I thought firstly I need a load to safely dump the coil secondary energy into, measure the current waveform and capture on a scope. Then see what capability the base coil pack driver unit can actually drive without failing, and then test a number of styles / types of coil to see whether I could improve upon the OE setup in terms of spark energy / power with no detriment... and the answer is...
Bench setup with the Renix D502 ecu, OEM coil pack driver unit...
Ring of death load... shooting spark energy straight into it...
OEM coil...
New coil, pick of the bunch... you have to look at the numbers, they are not absolutes as I'm measuring currents etc, so it's % change that counts... area under the graph stuff...
Coils tested in this little experiment:
... is YES!
So, ok what did you find faulksie... 1.. well for the OEM setup, make sure you have a good OE capacitor (little black box and flying lead) fitted with good connections... and 2.. yes a tuned coil of higher power can be driven from the base unit successfully, and matching to the right coil I found 25% increase in spark energy, as the above scope pictures show, both the peak current and average current are up, where the average is really the burn energy of the plug once the spark has formed. I'm well happy with this result, and will be giving it a blast(!) when fitted to the car in the next week
Let the sparks begin...
Martin