Water does have a very high latent heat. You'd just trade some of its specific heat for some of its latent heat.
In terms of detonation resistance I think it's a bad idea. It will all be vaporized before the detonation occurs and I think that sacrificing some of the specific heat (cooling) to vaporize it more quickly would be a poor trade-off.
In terms of outright power, you want to get as much heat out of the air as possible before it crosses your intake ports to the cyllinder. Any cooling effect after the intake ports will be less effective in increasing the overal mass of air entering the engine. This would be because there is already a critical pressure drop across the intake ducts and any futher pressure drop in the cyllinder would require more camshaft or porting to increase flow into the cyllinder significantly.
Adrian~
|