If you’ve seen any new 2017 Silverados or Sierras out and about in your hometown, you’ve no doubt noticed their signature hood scoop. If you get a little closer to it, you’ll see that there’s actually a pretty prominent opening. So how do they keep unwanted foreign objects such as water, snow, or birds from getting in there?
Well, as it turns out, they actually had some engineers design the thing (weird, right?) and their solution is pretty elegant: a centrifugal separation chamber that pulls debris out of the air. Jalopnik has a video (which I can’t embed; go over there to watch the damn thing) that explains the process. The chamber seems to act a lot like a salad spinner. The chamber is shaped in such a way that the air continues to circulate while anything heavier falls to the bottom and exits through a valve and gets dumped underneath the truck where it belongs. The air continues through another filter, then funnels over to the other side of the engine where it gets piped into the engine itself to give it the cold air it needs to run smoothly. According to GM, the scoop provides about half of the air the truck needs, with the other half coming from a more standard fender-mounted inlet.
(h/t to Jalopnik)