The A, "Bee", C of Airflow, Air Temperature, and Air Pressure...

The "A" is for airflow, the "Bee" is for "Honey Bee" because a swarm of bees is a good way of visualizing the behavior of "molecules" in an air mass, and the "C" is for "CFM" which turns out to be a very confusing way of quantifying airflow.

On another forum I did a post called... "The Roach Air Motel... Air checks in, but it doesn't check out!" ...to try and explain why there's a much larger "CFM airflow" going into an engine's air filter than the "CFM airflow" going into the engine itself. The "Roach Air Motel" effect also occurs in reverse because for any air filter there's more "CFM airflow" coming out of the downstream side of the air filter's element than the "CFM airflow" going into the up stream side!

This time around I'll try and explain this seemingly "mysterious CFM effect" by using "bees" as an analogy for "air molecules". Imagine you've got an entire enclosed football stadium filled with "bees" and that the "bee density" is so thick you can't even see your hand in front of your face. The bees are buzzing around in a random chaotic manner and bumping into each other and into you and into the walls of the stadium and into everything else they come into contact with.

Say you need to transport some bees from inside the stadium to a customer who's got a large trailer waiting outside and you've got a 1 ft^3 box with a removable lid to do the job with. So you bring the box inside the stadium and remove the lid to let some bees inside and then close the lid and take the box out to the waiting trailer and then open the lid to let the bees out.

If you repeat this exercise once per minute the box is flowing 1 ft^3/min or 1 CFM of bees but the customer doesn't care about that because he's only paying for the number of bees getting delivered per minute and that of course depends how many bees are in each boxful which in turn depends on the "bee density" inside the stadium.

Well the wife is pestering me again so I'm going to post this much just to see if anyone's actually interested in hearing the rest of the bee story including why "atmospheric bee pressure" doesn't depend on "atmospheric bee temperature" but "atmospheric bee density" does depend on "atmospheric bee temperature" whereas "stadium bee pressure" depends on "stadium bee temperature" but "stadium bee density" doesn't depend on "stadium bee temperature" and how to relate the CFM delivery of bees to the number of bees delivered for various situations?

If there's no interest in bees I'll just move on with completing the "CFM equation" which is actually the equation for the CFM airflow into the engine's air filter that's needed to provide the customer "engine" with the number of bees it needs to "eat" a given amount of "fuel" or in the case of my C7 "CAT food"!