im curious if haltech has a option to shutdown vehicle when tempatures reach a certain point (chosen by tuner)?
i think it would be a good safety feature.

 

There's another way to do this...
Just richen the last few bars on the coolant temp compensation map.
This causes the engine to run really rich when the temps do get really hot.


-Ted

 

Which ECU?
As Ted stated just about every auto maker both piston and rotary do it the way Ted stated. You can also take it a step further and change the ignition timing vs coolant temp.

 

Just shutting an engine off will cause it to heat up even more (heat soak), because the coolant stops moving through the radiator (if using a mechanical water pump).

 

Yeah, ideally you will set the mixture richer and retard timing so that when overheating happens you have some form of safe guard, but shutting off the engine will not be ideal.

Now the optimum thing to do here is have a very good cooling system so overheating doesnt happen, right?

 

Though I agree it's not best in most situations to just kill the engine, reducing load at the point the engine has gone into overheat territory is very important. An easy way to do this on a turbo car running any form of electronic boost control would be to us an ECU fan output (set to 250* or so?) to trigger a relay that would ground the boost control solenoid and temporarily force a 100% duty dycle and near 0 psi boost level. This combined with a warning light, triggered through the same relay, on the dash would be enough to alert the driver of the impending bad situation and give them time to get out of the throttle. And ECU output wouldn't be required. The relay could be triggered by any one of the available coolant temp switches on the market.

If you've reduced load to 0 and the temp is still rising increasing the fuel mixture isn't helping. At that point you need to shut down.

 

yep, i agree, step one is to drop power, so that the driver can do something. step 2 is to drown the motor