My intake temps are running pretty high. Ambient in the middle of the day this time of year could be anywhere from 80-85, but after 15 minutes of driving (without boosting) my intake temps can get as high as 130.
I had the air filter mounted directly onto the turbo compressor which was pulling in all the hot engine bay air, so I added some piping and now the air filter is pulling cool air directly from the front of the car.
So now, I still get high intake temps, but interestingly enough, the intake temps actually lower I boost-it seems that when boosting, the velocity of the air increases-so the cool air I'm pulling in from the front of the car does not have a chance to get heated by the intake pipe that is exposed to the heat of the engine bay.
So I'm thinking it's time to wrap the intake and intercooler pipes. I purchased some of the gold wrapping tape, but found a youtube video that showed that polished aluminum has at least the same heat reflective capability as gold wrap(in some cases more), so I probably won't see much of a difference.
What do you suggest for intake pipe insulation-what do you use that works?

 

What intercooler are you running? It's pretty well established reflect-a-gold on charge pipes doesn't make a discernable difference to charge temps. As you correctly point out, the air flow within the pipes is too fast for the pipe wall to affect air temp any discernable amount. Best way to reduce intake temps is a bigger intercooler, water spray, or water injection.
The cold air feed to the air cleaner is a good thing. Re-route of air cleaner to front of car is good if you use a large diameter duct with gentle bends. Turbos don't usually like sucking on long intake pipes. Can knock quite a bit of efficiency out of them.

 

Your intake temp sensor is probably getting heat soaked sitting in that big chunk of aluminum in the engine bay. Compressed air will absolutely be higher temperature than uncompressed. So your air temps are actually going up, but your readings are going down because of the amount of air flow going past the IAT is cooling the throttle body adapter. I ran into this same issue until I vented my hood.

 

I've got a fairly large no-name ic and water injection, but my concern was high temps pre-boost. I think a vented hood may be what I need. I need to get those hot underhood temps out of there. Maybe wrapping the downpipe also? I tried a turbo blanked a few years back and that didn't seem to make much of a difference.
Thanks for the info re: reflect-a-gold.

 

Makes sense. So if that's the case, my intake temps aren't nearly as high as I think. OK, good to know.

 

I'm a big fan of wrapping/shielding all the hot exhaust bits. Everything you can do to reduce heat soaking into intake manifolds and damaging wiring, vacuum hoses and fuel lines.
As to the gold tape, its good stuff, just that its not noticeably effective on charge pipes once the air inside is actually moving.
Its interesting you are getting high temps at the compressor inlet with a cold air feed. Its usually pretty easy to get near ambient temps there even with a bit of flexible duct jerry rigged to blow fresh air at the air filter with no real fencing around it.

 

Think you want to wrap the hot bits (or better yet ceramic coat), and shield the cold bits

Not sure the effectiveness of gold wrap though. But it's probably better than nothing

Also, a good cooling system is much more effective than wrapping/shielding (but again, everything counts)

 

From my experience i can so no, it wont help much. I have my exhaust manifold and turbo hotside ceramic coated and gold reflective heat tape on the lower intake manifold. The intake still heatsoaks pretty hard, under boost with the TMIC still its not uncommon for Megasquirt to see 150* intake temps. The biggest difference will be getting the hot air out of the engine bay as quickly and efficiently as possible.

 

Insulation of any type (gold foil, wraps, etc) only slows heat transfer. So a more insulated pipe will get to the same ambient temperature, but at a much slower rate. Gold foils, or polished pipes are only effective to reflect radiant heat, not convective heat which is what the engine bay is full of. You only see a benefit from reflective heat shields near exhausts or other high temperatures which actually get hot enough to radiate heat. Think of standing next to a fire, holding your hand in front of your face blocks the radiated heat, but it doesn't block the hot air blowing towards you.

If you want to actually cool the intake charge, you need to use something that provides active cooling, methanol injection, water injection, evaporative cooling, forced air etc.

 

Run a turbo blanket. I could touch the turbo blanket by hand after driving the car.