[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

Hair dryers are more powerful than that, and even at that power I am still having difficulty with the concept having enough juice to work.

There's your test right there. Cold start, 1500w hair dryer in the intake, what happens? Or stick two 75w light bulbs in there. That is the power you are talking about.

Don't need to test that; I know what will happen. Within a minute the plastic airbox will melt. The engine might misbehave or stall befiore that. 1500 Watt is way too much.

I'll break down the math for you.
This morning my engine was running at 1300 RPM when cold (9 degrees Celsius). At sea level.
The displacement is 1339 CC and the engine load, equal to intake manifold pressure when the EGR valve is shut, was just 28%. Not very cold so not an ideal example, but real and verified data.

How much air did it use per second?
1300 RPM means 650 intake strokes/minute or 10.8333333 per second.
Times the displacement (1339 CC) is 14,505.833333 cc per second or 14.50583333 liter.
But that is just at 0.28 atmospheric, so 14.505833333 times .28 is 4.061633333 liters of air per second at atmospheric pressure.
It used just 4 liters of air per second.

How much does that weigh?
First we need to know how much that amount of air weighs by factoring in the density. Wikipedia says the density of air at sea level at 10 degrees Celsius is 1.2466 kg per cubic meter, or gram per liter. We use 4.06163333 liter per second so that's 5.063232113333 gram per second.

By how much can we raise the temperature of that using 1500 Watt?
Need to apply the heat capacity of air which is about 1.01 kiloJoule per kilogram per Kelvin change (Kelvin uses the same scalar unit as Celsius).
It takes 1.01 Joule per second to heat up 1 gram of air by 1 degree Celsius (or Kelvin, or 1.8 Fahrenheit).
Joule per second is Watt.
We need 1.01 times 5.06323113333 makes about 5.114 Watt to raise the air temperature by one degree.
When we apply 1500 Watt we'll raise the temperature by 293.32 degrees Celsius.
As we started at 9 Celsius we end up just beyond 300 Celsius.

That's the whole point.
It takes an enormous amount of energy to heat up an engine block with oil and coolant and all the other stuff.
But it takes just 150 Watt to heat a few grams of air per second to summer spec.
The purpose of heating the air is NOT to heat the engine directly, but to make the combustion process run leaner and therefore hotter, cleaner, more efficient.

The nice thing about making it electric is that I can switch it on and off to study its effect. I will.