Curious question about ideal VE

I made an excel graph of how my car's ideal VE would look like across the RPM range and noticed a couple of things. It seems like every vehicle's ideal VE graph would behave like a line with constant slope being 24.057 and the y intercept being 0 because no air can flow when the car is off.

What does the area under the curve mean?

Why don't you share you excel spreadsheet that generates the graph. Perhaps we can advice why your model might need some additional inputs you haven't considered.

When looking at a graph (like horsepower or torque), we can calculate the area under the curve as the range of RPM x average of the value over that range. To be more accurate, we can break the area into smaller segments (say 100 RPM increments), then add those areas together. The concept of focusing on area under the curve, is that a peak horsepower that isn't very broad is not as useful as a slightly lower peak horsepower that carries over a larger RPM range.

In reality very often VE curve looks almost identical to engine torque curve so if VE curve is drawn realistically the area under it would represent integral torque of the engine.

Here's the file. After reading what you guys wrote, it seems that I might've missed something. Would an ideal VE calculation also behave like the real TQ curve? Let me know what you see that could be changed to better represent the real curve.

I know what I did wrong. After more learning I now understand that what I plotted is the total volume of air that could be crammed into my engine at any given RPM and not VE. Ideal VE for any car would be 100% and if graphed, it would be a line across the given RPM range.

In some applications VE can go even above 100 percent at some RPM. For instance NASCAR pro engine develops up to 130 percent VE.

Here is an example of VE curves for the same NA engine with different intake pressure. The shapes look exactly the same which tells us the pattern dictated by the choice of hardware for this particular engine.

David and Shota, thank you for helping me on this. :)