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Progressive Water Injection System
ASM-ENG-900

PWI-1 Progressive Water Injection System. Taking a tried and true idea, and taking it up a notch. Makes pump fuel act like race fuel!

Install Difficulty Rating

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Progressive Water Injection System

The process of compressing air to create boost and power, has a nasty byproduct of heat. Heated air lacks the density to make higher horsepower, increases detonation and forces the ECU to pull timing. All of which reduce the power you are looking to create. In order to combat this heat, we manufacture air-to-air intercooler upgrades for nearly every vehicle we offer products for. But we are always restricted by the physical restraints of the vehicles size and by the fuel offered at the pump. Yet, high horsepower engines demand additional cooling and detonation control. This is where Water/methonol injection come into play.

History:

Water/Methonal injection is nothing new by any means. It was first used successfully in during WWII on tanks and fighter planes engines. The tradition started here and has been used in Formula 1 engines (1980s), It was supplied as an OE part on the SAAB 9-5, World Rally cars use it (1995 onwards), and now todays high powered, small displacement, forced induction engines.

PERRIN Performance (our co brand. find more infromation at www.perrinperformance.com) product developers sought out to create an easy to use and comprehensive system to add either water or water and methanol to the air charge. We went to the industry leader Aquamist™ to help with the development of this product, and together we created the amazing product you see before you on this page.

Education

The PERRIN PWI-1 water/methanol injection system is designed to suppress detonation caused by high intake charge temperatures and or when the effective compression ratio has been taken beyond the auto ignition point (of fuel) by increased boost from a turbo or a supercharger. To suppress Detonation, a fine mist of a mixture of water and methanol is injected into the intake charge. Water, with its high latent heat content, and methanol, with its high octane rating, are extremely effective at controlling the onset of detonation. From this you can gain power from increasing timing, or leaning the engine out, or simply add a large margin of safety to your engine.

By adding an extremely fine mist of water you can effectively add an additional intercooler to your vehicle. This lowers charge temperatures, reduces any tendency for detonation, and thus greatly improves horsepower and torque. Most clients will see gains in excess of 20WHP once tuned for! All while increasing safety and longevity of the engine.

To use the PWI system to its fullest, retuning of engine needs to be done. Doing nothing other than adding the PWI system to a properly tuned car will generally loose a slight amount of power but gain a high margin of safety. Some ECU’s constantly pull timing due to poor gas or very hot climates. In this type of situation, the car will gain power do to the suppressed Detonation, and the ECU adding ignition timing back into the car.

Cars that can benefit from the PWI are cars with poorly mounted, or small intercoolers, like the WRX, Legacy GT turbo, Mini cooper S, Mazdaspeed 6, Audi/VW 1.8T cars, Mitsubishi Eclipse or cars with turbo kits or supercharger kits with no intercoolers. But this does not limit the PWI-1’s ability to increase HP on cars with aftermarket intercoolers, where pump gas is being pushed to its limit of detonation.

The PERRIN™ Performance PWI-1 Water Injection System includes everything you need for a professional installation. Simply provide your own bucket of water! (Your MINI has several factory installed reservoirs.) With a dash mounted control and display you can activate or deactivate the system as well as monitor the water level, flow and perform tests of the entire kit. Additionally, the PWI-1 brain uses trim pots to adjust flow, and injection start. The brain incorporates several safety functions, which can detect when the nozzle is blocked, or water is low in tank. If this happens the PWI-1 brain can be set to cut boost, switch to a different map (ECU dependent), or turn on a light or any number of things you can come up with. These are features simply not found on other water injection systems. Easy to assemble and install. Includes hoses, mounting hardware, instructions, and tuning tips.

Here's how it works:

Water is extracted from a water tank through the electromagnetic pump straight to the intake charge. The water vaporizes in the combustion chamber, drawing out unwanted heat. This in turn controls detonation, and slows the burn rate of fuel, basically turns your pump fuel into race fuel.

The Progressive part of the PWI-1

The idea of injecting water or a mixture of water/methonol have been around for a long. But what makes the PERRIN PWI-1 system stand out is how it delivers the water. The progressive part of our system refers to the mixture being delivered progressively as more fuel is being delivered. In order to make full use of a water injection system, a set percentage of water to fuel is needed. 10-20% of the fuel being delivered is the rule of thumb. Non-Progressive, less expensive systems have a fixed volume of water that can be delivered. These systems suffer from too much water at lower RPMS and not enough at higher. This causes a loss in power, at both lower RPMs(too much water) and high RPMS (no detonation control) The PWI-1 system uses Fuel Injector duty cycle to monitor the amount of fuel flow. From this we can ensure the 10-20% mixture of water vs. fuel. In the end this means more horsepower and a safer running engine!

High Pressure Pump

Working with the industry leader Aquamist, has the benefit of using the most tried and true pumps in the world. Since the Aquamist pump has been used in nearly every World Rally Championship car, and sold to thousands of car across the world, we thought it might be ok to use.

This pump is constructed very different than any other pump used for Water injection. The pump has no motor, or moving parts to wear out like all other water injection pumps use. The pump uses an electromagnet housed around a piston. On each side of the piston is a one way valve. When the electromagnet is energized, it pushes the piston to side forcing water out one end, and sucking in water on the other. A spring pushes the piston back into place, and is now ready for another pump. Imagine this happening many times a second, and you get water flow! This all sounds complicated, but is very simple and very reliable. The only thing we changed is the type of seals in the pump. Instead of the normal Butyl rubber seals, we changed them to Teflon seal to allow the pump to be used with nearly any chemical!

Nozzles

Included with the system are special precision nozzles designed to produce an ultra fine mist. In order to make the most of your water injection system, the atomization of water is an important feature. A poorly designed nozzle can cause a unequal mixture delivery to each cylinder, or worse hydro-lock your engine. The 3 sizes we include are 1.0mm, .8mm and .6mm nozzles. These nozzles cover flow rates needed to support 250-600 horsepower. (other nozzle sizes available) Included with system is a nozzle base. This base has a 18/NPT fitting on one end for easy installation into boost tubes.

Packaging

The PWI-1 system is made of of 4 main components. Pump assembly, Brain Box, Dash display, and Main harness. The pump assembly contains the pump, flow sensor, and mounting chassis. The chassis holds all the parts in a tight package, while offering many different methods of mounting. Threaded hole, and through allow for installation virtually anywhere.

The Brain Box, is where most of the magic happens. The Brain Box contains 3 trim pots for setting up when the injection starts, pump gain, and a trim pot for setting up the nozzles flow rate. Along with this, the box contains the wire harness terminal for connecting the Brain Box to the pump assembly. A terminal is also integrated for the dash display harness.

An important part of the system is the dash mounted display. This display gives the driver a heads up as to what is going on with the system. There are Ultrabrite LED's indicating when the system starts spraying, a system fault, and when the tank is low on water. There are 2 buttons located at the top of the display. One button turns the system on or off, and the other button a test button which turns the pump on at 100% for testing purposes.

Finally is the wire harness. This main harness is used to connect the system to the vehicles battery, and other sensors. Included with the harness are the 3 wires used to activate user setup items such as boost cut, map switching. This harness has a flying lead type connection for the Brain Box which allows for an even cleaner install.

All these pieces are designed as compact as possible to allow for easy integration to your vehicle.

Safety Features

Another feature the PWI-1 system offers above and beyond other systems is SAFTEY! When a highly strung engine is tuned to use Water Injection, there is a danger if for some reason the water stops getting delivered to the engine. If this happens, the cooling ability, and detonation suppression gained from injecting water goes away. This can put your engine is a very unsafe state. In order to combat this situation from happening (and it will happen at some point) we have incorporated safety features into the system.

The first system is the blocked nozzle detection. Using a flow sensor, we can determine the proper flow rate for a given nozzle (part of the setup). If the nozzle flow rate varies from this calculated flow rate plus or minus a small %, the PWI-1 brain throws up a "flag". This "flag" turns on a light on the dash mounted display indicating a fault in the system. Also this "flag" allows the user to setup their own system to help bring the engine back to a safe level. We include 3 wires that the end user can setup things like, boost cut, map switching, LED's, warning lamps, and anything the user desires. This is where the PWI-1 system goes above and beyond other systems.

The last system in place is the float switch. The float switch mounts in the tank and when mixture is low, a light on the dash mounted display lights up. This can be very helpful in keeping your tank full of water/methonal.

MINI WATER INJECTION TEST #1

Through out this article I will be referring to Water/methonal injection as WI. With this entire test and install, we are showcasing this as something anyone can do. There is not a single part of this test that a person should feel scared to do except for the tuning which should be left up to a professional tuner.

Water injection has been used in many industries for a very long time. We are finally bringing it to the Mini world! Many have seen our PWI-1 system, and if you read the features from our site, you will be sold on it compared to other systems. This article is not about the PWI-1 system, but about using WI on the Mini cooper.

Why would you want to use WI on the Mini? The Intercooler is small, and lacks in the cooling department, smaller SC pulleys increase the charge temps, all these things increase the engine tendency to detonate or knock. So since running race fuel every day is not practical, the next best thing is water/methonal injection! The WI is only on when you are above a certain load point. Meaning only when the engine is about a certain RPM and or boost level. So it only injects it when you need it. This makes the consumption rate very low for normal driving conditions.

WI is all about cooling, which in turn controls detonation which allows the engine to make more power, and more power safer. Normally just injecting the mixture nets a loss in power. But with some cars, because of limitations of fuel and how the ECU is tuned, they can gain power. With the Mini some have seen gains with just injecting water/methanol, but with this test we will have to see!

Using the wonderful BimCOM software from RossTech, we collected some great convincing data!

We started with a customers 2005 Mini Cooper S (which BTW, Mr. Sterns Mini is one of the sweetest Minis around). This car has an ALTA 15% SC pulley, ALTA header, ALTA intake, stock IC, and Invidia 60mm exhaust.

As with all Mini Cooper S’s, or any boosted engine, more boost is the key to making power. Since boost isn’t going to change much unless we increase the SC speed, by a smaller pulley, or higher redline, the increases are not going to be huge, or are they??

INSTALLATION

There are a few good places to install the WI system in the Mini, but we chose a place that is both functional and shows off the system. With the install we choose to use the window washer tank (passenger side tank). Because the tank is much lower than the pump assembly, we will have to use a primer pump.

We thought we would use the OEM pump assembly to be the primer but the problem is wiring it up, and using diodes to do this wasn't going to be a job for everyone. So we used an off the shelf windshield washer pump from NAPA for about $14. Next was to remove the fender liner to get to the tank. The tank is a little tricky to remove, but once you figure out that there is a hidden connector (below) it comes out very easy.

After drilling an tapping a 1/8NPT fitting into the bottom of the tank we are ready to re-install it back into the car. Next up is the primer pump install. This is a pretty simple job. Drilling a couple of holes to mount it, and connect the tank hose up to it and we are done. Wiring the pump is simple. The PWi-1 has 2 wires ready to go, so all we have to do is extend the wires to the pump.

With the fender liner back in its time for the pump assembly and and wiring job. The pump assembly fits great in the window cowl area, and it is very easy to get a drill in there for the mounting holes. Besides the normal positive and negative connections, the only tricking connection is the fuel injector ground signal. This connection is important as this is how the PWI-1 picks up fuel injector duty cycle and determines how much water to inject.

All done!

The last step in the installation is is the nozzle placement. Normally putting the nozzle before the IC is better, when the IC is in a bad place, or is very small. So the Mini should have the nozzle before the IC. The only problem with putting it before the IC is that there is no good place that will distribute the water over the charged air in the tube equally. Because of the wide opening, if we put the nozzle in the center, much of the water will not affect the outer channels of the air, or the outer channels of the IC. Yes the water will be ingested in the engine, but much of the charge cooling effect will go to waste.

After the IC was a better choice as it iwas better centered over the boost tube, and would deliver water better to the complete charge. Since it was closer to the cylinders, it would also have better in-cylinder cooling. The only thing it may not effect is the charge temps. But we will have to see!

AFC NEO INSTALL

This is the one part of the whole install that is not for everyone. This requires cutting of ECU wires, and some soldering. Along with the install comes tuning, which needs to be done by a professional. This physical installation isn't very hard. Basically there are 5 wires to tap/cut into and then mounting of the head unit. From there is where it gets tricky. Tuning the ECU is not something for everyone. Besides having a dyno, and the tools to measure things like knock, AFR, and temps, the knowledge needed to adjust parameters is priceless. This is where you need to take your car to someone that knows what they are doing.

DYNO TIME

During the test we ran multiple runs for all changes. This ensures that the engine temps have stabilized, and proves the changes we were making. First off we did 7 base runs to get a good base number.

BASE RUN-shows base power as we might expect from these parts.

RUN WITH WATER ON- shows that the ECU is happy with WI on, and no tuning. Similar results might be had be race fuel.

RUN WITH SOME FUEL TUNING- got some smoothing to do, and there is definitely more power to be had.

RUN WITH FINAL FUEL TUNING, solid consistent, safe gains.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE TEST

-Charge temps dropped significantly. During the base, non-tuning runs with no water injection, we saw charge temps (post IC) reach on average 48C. Couple of times we saw 52C. This is with the stock IC of course. With the water on, the charge temps were much more consistent, and much lower. 34C is the highest we saw. Even with back to back, quick runs, we saw the first run peak at 32C, and the second run done 15-20seconds later, we saw, the same peak of 32C!! The charge temps being lowered 20C is a huge gain. 20C cooler charge temps, means less detonation, more ignition timing can be added, and the engine will be running much safer overall. Anyone in hot climates should really look into this as a safety device.

-Overall knock energy stayed the same. Normally when you increase power, weather by boost or tuning, the engine will create more noise. Given that there was an increase in power, the noise stayed about the same. When the water turned on (before tuning) the engine noise actually dropped about 20%. Again showing how much safer the car will run with WI.

-More power and torque everywhere! That is pretty obvious from the graphs shown above. The most important area where power was gained was at lower RPM. The ECU is tuned very lean here, and with the instant boost.

-the ECU liked more timing if the fuel would allow it. The WI proves this, by the fact that turning it on with no tuning nets good power increases. Because of the gains we saw before tuning, the PWI-1 by itself it a great option for more safer power.

-With the AFC pulling timing (because we added fuel) at lower RPM, there is still tons of power to be had.

-Once again, this combo of parts makes more power than the JCW kit, and it is still far less money.

CONCLUSION-

213WHP and 190ft-lbs of torque is great power for a 15% pulley car. Maybe the best results out there. I would venture to say this is the highest HP 15% mini with no ECU flash (higher redline). Compared to an intake system, or exhaust or anything else, the gains are much better add to that durability, and we have a winner. Normally when you get to this point in “bolt-ons”, to get a gain like this is not possible. But this is only a small showing of what WI can do. Because we are using the Apex AFC to retune the fueling, we are not able to change timing independently. Because the AFC changes the MAP sensor output, it also effects timing. More fuel = less timing, less fuel = more timing. If we, I should say when we are able to tune fueling and timing separately, we can do far more!

I am sure some are seeing this test thinking "Great, WI works, i am just going to go buy one of those cheap systems." One thing to remember with other systems is they do not all deliver the proper fuel/water mixture. Most of them just tune on at a given boost, and deliver the same amount of water through the entire RPM /load band. This is bad as too much water will be delivered at low rpm/load, and not enough at high rpm/load. The progressive nature of our system delivers that 10-20% water vs. fuel everywhere. This is important to making the most out of the WI.

David’s car can gain more power by a couple of things, one being a larger exhaust, like our 2.5” system, a smaller 17% or19% pulley, larger Intercooler and one of the most important things is a properly tuned ECU. A simple redline change will net an easy extra 10-15WHP with the existing setup.

And yes, David is already bugging us about those next parts.