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air/water intercooling
luke2152 - 25/2/15 at 08:56 PM

Does anyone have any experience using air/water heat exchanger setup.

Have now purchased 2 (fortunately 2nd hand and inexpensive) air/air intercoolers and couldn't get either of them to fit inside my nosecone with my radiator (oh so close but not quite). Started looking at air/water setups which make it easy to fit the heat exchanger and do so with minimal pipework. I know they are not suited to endurance racing and the like due to the core never getting chance to cool just wondering how well they deal with fast road and occasional trackday - and how big a radiator you need to run them with (I was thinking repurpose a large oil cooler or bike radiator about half the size of my polo radiator). I imagine the weight of water in the system could be significant too.

Dooey99 - 25/2/15 at 09:12 PM

i despise charge coolers, air/air are the only way i would ever go, in a lotus exige we built a couple of years ago we had a huge intercooler where the boot would be and we were running 360bhp with a standard toyota 4 cylinder 2zz-ge engine, back to the point... on a hot weekend racing in spa it was 32 degrees ambient air temp and the temperature of the air entering the inlet manifold was 37 degrees (this was with our air to air cooler) similar cars racing in our class running charge coolers (air/water heat exchanges) had inlet temps of about 70ish degrees. thats over double ambient air temp!!! where as we had 5 degrees more than ambient air temp as we were running a good intercooler setup

Dick - 25/2/15 at 09:17 PM

"They are not suited to endurance racing" oh yes they are people say they dont work because they cant set them up correctly. I have a system fitted to my car and would never go back to a standard intercooler. I have a 6x10 core unit and this has the pump running as soon as the engine starts this pumps via a alloy charge cooler radiator that is in the front of the nose cone it has a fan that runs as soon as the water in the system runs above 15deg. Drove the skcc artic tour this year in 30 plus temps all day lots of it was hard driving and never see intake tempratures like i had with the normal inter cooler Talk to pwr or look on their website its a bit of an eye open. I was allways a bit sceptical about them but not any more the other cars we are putting togeather are being fitted with them from the start, yes not cheap but then i wasted over £400 on intercoolers that dont work in my car. Dont wate your money on cheap ebay copies

Doctor Derek Doctors - 26/2/15 at 08:33 AM

A simple way to look at it is that if you use an Air to Water charge-cooler the radiator will need to increase in size to do the same cooling as the air to Air intercooler would have done as you will have transferred that heat into the water system. So you might save the space of the intercooler but you need to package a much bigger radiator.
In a small nose cone it would probably be easier to package a small intercooler and radiator rather than one large radiator.

Dick - 26/2/15 at 08:44 AM

If Air to air was stil the best way to go then i wonder why motor bikes all use water cooling for the engine when it whould be so easy to duct the air around them.
Just a small point

MikeRJ - 26/2/15 at 09:23 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Dooey99
i despise charge coolers, air/air are the only way i would ever go, in a lotus exige we built a couple of years ago we had a huge intercooler where the boot would be and we were running 360bhp with a standard toyota 4 cylinder 2zz-ge engine, back to the point... on a hot weekend racing in spa it was 32 degrees ambient air temp and the temperature of the air entering the inlet manifold was 37 degrees (this was with our air to air cooler) similar cars racing in our class running charge coolers (air/water heat exchanges) had inlet temps of about 70ish degrees. thats over double ambient air temp!!! where as we had 5 degrees more than ambient air temp as we were running a good intercooler setup



That just says the chargecooler systems were not correctly specified for the application. You can't magically have the same cooling capacity in something a 1/4 of the size.

MikeRJ - 26/2/15 at 09:25 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Doctor Derek Doctors
A simple way to look at it is that if you use an Air to Water charge-cooler the radiator will need to increase in size to do the same cooling as the air to Air intercooler would have done as you will have transferred that heat into the water system. So you might save the space of the intercooler but you need to package a much bigger radiator.
In a small nose cone it would probably be easier to package a small intercooler and radiator rather than one large radiator.


I think you may have the wrong idea about charger coolers; they don't share the main engine radiator they have their own radiator. Whichever system you use there are still two heat exchangers under the nose cone.

Oddified - 26/2/15 at 09:52 AM

I think that both air-air and air-water work perfectly ok if they're done right.

There's pro's and cons for both. On my car i went for air-water charge cooler because of packaging issues in the front of my car (air-air intercooler and pipe work just wouldn't fit in). I have a bell intercooler core in the intake plenum, bosch electric water pump (controlled with the fuel pump) and the biggest 2nd rad in the front of the car i could get in which also has a fan fitted controlled by the ecu from air intake temps (currently set at 30c). Works very well for the space i had.

I also fitted an override switch for the water pump and fan so that if i'm doing a bit of rwyb drag racing i can cool the charge cooler and the entire intake plenum right down between runs with the engine off, you can't do that with an air-air intercooler set-up

Ian

CNHSS1 - 26/2/15 at 11:14 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Oddified
I think that both air-air and air-water work perfectly ok if they're done right.



^this

most aftermarket intercoolers ive seen are 'orrible, and yet work ok-ish. Most are put off by the complexities of charge cooling but its simple enough.

water/air charge cooolers are great for packaging, you can have really short charge pipework runs from turbo/supercharger to plenum and site the water rad pretty much anywhere.

as for the charge cooler water rad, I use OEM plastic tanked rads as they weigh bugger all, are silly cheap and theres every shape and size imaginable. Used to have a golf tdi rad on current car, but now using a vw caddy rad as its the same but 2" shallower.

As oddified says, you can leave the cahrgecooler pump running after a run (mines used for sprints/hillclimbs) and it pulls the heat out in a few mins. Before the start theres no heatsoak like an engine bay IC either, so the charge temps are very low so the ecu doesn't have to compensate (more fuel, retard ign) like a heatsoaked air to air.

do either method properly and they are fine