put heat wrap on my intake
 

Wrapped my intake with header wrap today.
I love how it looks, but I was talking to a friend who said that it might keep heat out until it gets to a certain temperature, but then it will stay hot and the heat soaking will be worse. Anyone have thoughts on this?


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Heat wrap is designed to keep heat in. You've essentially made a hot air intake.

b..but insulators don't work like that. Not to sound rude, and correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't say "oh I'm wrapped around X which means it needs to be hot."
It's a barrier between two temperatures, the hotter one stays on one side of the barrier, and the other side is unaffected in a perfect world.
In this case, the intake/intake tube temperature is one side of the barrier, and the under-hood temp is the other side of the barrier. Like wearing an oven mitt and putting your hand in the oven. you won't feel the heat from the oven on your hand.
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the issue is that when the barrier itself heats up it turns into a heat blanket wrapping the intake tube, and will take much longer to lose temp (making the heat soaking worse). now the question is how long would it take until it would get to 100% of the under-hood temp? Or would it be like an oven mitt where you could stand there holding a 300 degree plate for as long as you want to?

Look at f1 intakes. They use a wrap designed to reflect radiant heat

oh for sure, I'd rather do gold reflective tape if I actually cared about getting a 1hp gain. I did this mostly for looks because I got sick of looking at that stupid plastic k&n air tube which looks like it belongs in a happy meal box, but didn't want to go full bling bling "i'm a wannabe racer with gold tape on my stock NA s2000" either. I'm just hoping it's not going to take anything away from the performance, because I really like how it looks.

http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/k...psdbdacde4.jpg

i think it looks cool as F.
darcy

If you were sucking ambient temp outside air it probably would work well, and stay cooler, but if you are sucking some hot underhood air it will trap some heat. It would be cool to measure your intake temps if you have a scangauge . Driving down an open road you might be fine.

Maybe if you put the header wrap on inside out, it will keep the heat to the outside better :)

Plastic is a good insulator, if maybe it was metal it might help.

If you're doing it for looks then just do it, what does it matter.

I think it looks good with just the stock arm.

As as designer of gas turbine intakes and exhausts, I would hesitate to wrap the intake with insulation, unless the you could guarantee a constant flow of cold, dense air into the engine. Once the engine is switched off, the engine bay remains hot. Eventually, the intake system will heat soak and be at the same ambient temperature as the rest of the engine bay. So now, the insulation you have put around the intake is keeping the heat in and warming up your intake air, reducing engine output, by decreasing the intake air density. You could calculate this with the following:

The air mass in is directly related to the density of air, and the introduced volume.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/9/...4bf57376f5.png,where https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/6/...88d9a1501b.png is the mass, https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/...df8fe65ed1.png is the density and https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/...1529976807.png is the volume of the gas. As the volume https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/...1529976807.png is fixed, only density https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/...df8fe65ed1.png of the air can be modified to vary air mass. The density of the air depends of the relative humidity, altitude, pressure drop and temperature.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/e/...bca9f6c9c2.pngwhere:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/c/...9d59878a03.png Density of the humid air (kg/m³)https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/...e032cf618f.png Partial pressure of dry air (Pa)https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/6/...331d6bada2.png Specific gas constant for dry air, 287.058 J/(kg·K)https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/9/...760fa3db26.png Temperature (K)https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/0/...ce36b8db65.png Pressure of water vapor (Pa)https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/5/...b3b955d4f5.png Specific gas constant for water vapor, 461.495 J/(kg·K)https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/d/...3069f9b2d4.png Molar mass of dry air, 0.028964 (kg/mol)https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/1/...0929a4a975.png Molar mass of water vapor, 0.018016 (kg/mol)https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/a/...7c7559e71c.png Universal gas constant, 8.314 J/(K·mol)
If you are worried, you would be better off putting a heat shield between the engine and the intake.