Heatshield Armor Insulation Demonstration
Heatshield Armor™ exhaust insulation is the best, most effective exhaust heat reduction solution, lessening the amount of heat radiated by an exhaust header, pipe, catalytic converter, and muffler by up to 70 percent. By drastically reducing the number of heat components the exhaust system is exposed to, Armor helps to increase its overall component life, reliability, and performance.
Insulating the exhaust system also helps to improve engine performance by increasing the number of exhaust gasses removed from an engine's combustion chambers. This means less residual exhaust gasses in the cylinders when the next combustion cycle starts, including those which can retard the combustion process and reduce the amount of power the engine makes. You can read the details on how this works in our blog covering exhaust system insulation benefits. Heatshield Armor can also be removed if necessary for any maintenance related to the exhaust system or installation of new components.
Heat Shield Insulation: How it Works
You can talk about the science and properties behind Heatshield Armor's effectiveness, but in the end, seeing is believing. For that reason, we will visually demonstrate the difference heat shield insulation makes using a laser thermometer gun and a FLIR camera. For the purposes of this test, we are using a 1994 Ford Ranger to show that even on a stock, a non-performance application makes a significant difference. For example, the more horsepower an engine makes, the more heat it generates through its exhaust. As such, the benefits as seen with a more mundane engine increase with performance applications.
ABOVE: This 1994 Ranger is a bit long in the tooth, but its factory exhaust header (Ford switched from a cast iron manifold to a tubular exhaust header in the early 1990s) is a great way to reveal the effectiveness of Heatshield Armor when it comes to insulating exhaust pipes and reducing the amount of heat the exhaust system radiates.
ABOVE: For a side-by-side comparison, we cut a small piece of Heatshield Armor and used it to cover just one section of the exhaust header, leaving the other uncovered. When installing Heatshield Armor, you don't fully wrap the pipe in the insulation. Instead, you have to leave a small section of pipe uncovered so it can breathe. Heatshield Armor is so efficient at insulating that if you fully wrapped an exhaust pipe with it, the amount of heat kept in would exceed the maximum temperature the pipes are capable of handling, leading to pipe degradation and failure. See more below.
ABOVE: With the laser thermometer, the uninsulated portion of the exhaust header reads 289 degrees F.
ABOVE: Measuring the temperature of the Heatshield Armor insulated portion gives us a 111.4 degrees F reading. That's a 178 degree drop, which means that’s 178 degrees less heat being radiated into the engine compartment. Besides less radiated heat, pipes insulated with Heatshield Armor see increased exhaust gas temperatures, which improves exhaust system performance and pulls more spent exhaust gasses from the combustion chambers. Therefore, on the next intake cycle, there will be less spent gasses remaining to retard combustion and hurt performance.
ABOVE: Switching to our FLIR One (Forward Looking Infrared) camera, you can see how hot the unshielded pipe gets by the bright white-yellow areas.
ABOVE: With Heatshield Armor in place, you can see how much difference it makes in cutting down radiated heat from the exhaust header. The bright white-yellow area shows uninsulated pipe, and the purple section is the Armor insulated part.
Heatshield Products
Our expertise in automotive thermal management and sound deadening allows us to create products that help your vehicle perform its best. Heatshield Products manufactures American-made heat shield armor, barriers, sleeving, wraps and other related and non-related products for automotive use. Visit our website to learn more or contact us about finding a dealer.
