Hi folks,
I was talking to one of my peers at work about the Roadster's air flow design, and it's acute ability to vacuum up all the little bits of cruft along our roadways, and pack them into the PEM and motor. We've discussed here already methods to put screens and filters around the underside blower intakes... He had a different idea.
Consider what modern refrigerators do with their defrost cycle, where they temporarily reverse things to melt any ice and blow the vapors out of the system. What if we inserted a little board with some relays and logic on it, between the PEM and the blowers, so that after the car shuts down we spin up the blowers in reverse for a few seconds to suck out all the junk from the internal air channels and blow it out of the car before it gets totally packed in there? We presume the blower motor will run in reverse on reverse polarity. I don't expect the blowers themselves will be very efficient in reverse, but will it be enough to make a difference?
I don't really care for the added filters suggested by others, in that they inherently impeed some of the air flow to the system. With the hot summers around here, the car needs all the air it can get. Maybe this would be enough to keep things unblocked between service appointments, or be able to stretch them out a bit?
I was talking to one of my peers at work about the Roadster's air flow design, and it's acute ability to vacuum up all the little bits of cruft along our roadways, and pack them into the PEM and motor. We've discussed here already methods to put screens and filters around the underside blower intakes... He had a different idea.
Consider what modern refrigerators do with their defrost cycle, where they temporarily reverse things to melt any ice and blow the vapors out of the system. What if we inserted a little board with some relays and logic on it, between the PEM and the blowers, so that after the car shuts down we spin up the blowers in reverse for a few seconds to suck out all the junk from the internal air channels and blow it out of the car before it gets totally packed in there? We presume the blower motor will run in reverse on reverse polarity. I don't expect the blowers themselves will be very efficient in reverse, but will it be enough to make a difference?
I don't really care for the added filters suggested by others, in that they inherently impeed some of the air flow to the system. With the hot summers around here, the car needs all the air it can get. Maybe this would be enough to keep things unblocked between service appointments, or be able to stretch them out a bit?