I've never seen it that bad. Ouch

 

Is it rust or is it rust colored lead?

 

 

Rusty Turbines would be a good name for a gritty old country-music singer who gravitates towards the aerospace crowd.

 

First thing I did when I saw your thread is google for c16 content, but VP fuels website gave me pages/walls of text so I gave up. Makes sense. Do you start the car for short periods of time often? Or does it get fully warmed up and/or flogged every time.

If you do lots of cold starts without burning off all the condensation, I bet your pcv system looks really nasty too

 

I don't usually use it for short trips. Most times it's a 30 min+ journey.

Would E85 be worse?

 

Not sure but I doubt it.
While being supposedly more corrosive and water absorbing than pump gas, I've not seen it cause this much damage since I started messing with it in 2011, and every high hp turbo car I've done since then is on e85.
I think your solution of switching to a better hotside material is probably best in this situation

 

My efr turbo was used origionally with c16. after just 50 hrs of use, the turbine blades took a beating. My speculation was lead deposits hitting the blades at 150,000 rpm.

 

@ 18psi, to swap turbines now will set me back $1k (two + extrude hone + tax etc) and the only option I have is NiResist. Not really the greatest either. I really need to tackle the problem right and go stainless turbine. That involves a LOT of fab work. I wonder if ceramic coating will buy me some time?

 

I'd be really nervous coating the inside. it tends to chip off on normal housings, I can only imagine it being even worse on a setup like yours

 

You should swap engines with Aidanj. His burns enough oil to protect the turbine from rust.

 

 

My understanding is that there's a whole plethora of Ni-Resist branded alloys, but you're still just adding additional alloying components to "grey iron" (or iron with graphite parcipitates), which does not form any protective oxide layer like stainless. It will, depending on alloy (levels of nickel and chromium), form some protective carbides in the microstructure. From my reading of the rather sales-y technical documents, in a corrosive environment (hot inert gases with oil vapor and gasoline mixed in, e.g. exhaust for instance) the main benefit is predicable, consistently even corrosion across a surface at a reduced rate compared to classic grey iron. This is very useful for high stress applications where the pitting typical of normal iron corrosion could concentrate stress in unpredictable areas and cause a fatigue failure. So, for a lot less money than stainless for large assemblies (think multi-ton castings), they (let's say an oil field company for example) could use Ni-Resist, study the rate of corrosion, and just specify a adequete maintenance/replacement schedule for critical parts.

TL;DR: if you want to not deal with this again get something stainless or a new cast iron component with appropriate protective coating.

 

Ni-Resist, specifically D5S, is significantly better than regular ductile for corrosion resistance and high temp strength. It is commonly used on exhaust components in gasoline engines. As far as I know, there are no coatings that can survive turbine temperatures. I think the best I've seen was like 200-300 C? Definitely not 900C. Lincoln Industries has a teflon coating that's extremely tough, but it's not capable of those temps.

 

 

That is almost unbelievable how bad that looks in those housings. I have never seen anything like that ever, really odd.

 

I instantly remembered "Rusty spoons" cartoon on youtube. Check it out lol. That does look pretty insane.