[Norbie]

Who told you water will burn? I assure you this is not the case! What it does is flash into steam, thus absorbing latent heat from its surroundings.

The point of water injection is to reduce combustion chamber temperatures, which allows you to run more boost/compression/ignition advance. It does not increase the octane of the fuel, but it has a similar effect. If you tune your engine accordingly you can see worthwhile gains, but I doubt it would be worth it on a NA 5M-GE unless it was heavily modified.

A nice side-effect of water injection is it keeps you pistons and combustion chambers squeaky-clean; it effectively steam-cleans the engine's internals every time you use it!

 

[Norbie]

Splitting water into its component elements requires very high temperatures, like 1000 degrees C and above. I seriously doubt you'd see that sort of temperature inside your engine; if you did, it would melt!

I might add the the energy required to split water is more than the energy gained by re-combining H2 and O2 (this is one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics), so there wouldn't be any point doing this anyway.

 

[Norbie]

One of the normal by-products of combustion is water, in fact your exhaust is 99% C02 and H20, so you don't need to worry about water injection rusting your engine or exhaust any more than usual! As mentioned above though, it's probably not a bad idea to run the engine without water for a minute or so before shutting it down.

 

[Norbie]

oh, and if you spray too much water you can create a condition known as hydro lock, which is where your engine will lock up as water cant be compressed.

I have yet to see a water injection setup capable of supplying anywhere near enough water for this to happen. A 2.8 litre engine consumes a LOT of air (93 litres per second at 5000rpm assuming 80% VE), so you'd pretty much have to pour water into the engine from a bucket before it would lock! This is a far cry from the small fogger nozzles used with water injection...

 

[Norbie]

I agree it's possible, I'm just saying you'd have to screw up pretty bad to make it happen!