I saw an episode of some car program on TV and saw a Ferrari with 2 intercooler connected to the intake manifold.

I want to try something like this, wondering if anyone tried this setup before. Obviously, I am not going to spend $1,000 on the turbo kit. I am thinking of a small junk yard cooler. Since the weather is so hot now, I can see some benefits. What do you guys think?

 

You want to install an intercooler to drop the temp of your intake charge on an N/A motor?

 

yeah... just a test. nothing big.

Echo does not = a civic. The displacment is close but nothign is the same.

THe intake is place up front and the exhaust manifold is some where in the back. I have this big empty spot in the front bumper and it is a perfect place of the intercooler. Like I said, nothing big.

 

i thought about this, but never knew if it would work.. someone find out my friend has his old dsm intercooler sitting around, i could be using that thing

 

I've seen an actual product in the mags that LOOKS like an intercooler.. It's a cold air intake that pipes down in front of the rad. At the end of the piping, instead of a cone filter, it's replaced with a unit that resembles an intercooler and sits in the bumper grill.

The purpose of an actual intercooler is to remove the heat in the air charge that a turbo/supercharger puts into the charge when compressing it. That being said, there are pressure losses when a forced induction charge routes through an intercooler which should be kept under 1 to 1.5 psi. If too much pressure is lost, then the intercooler is either useless or can actually decrease performance. In the case of N/A, if you were to theoretically hook up an intercooler which was fed from the exhaust manifold, I don't feel there would be enough pressure to justify the use of the intercooler, and this would probably degrade the performance of the engine.

My theory could be totally wrong though.

 

Jason - your theory is exactly what I was thinking. THe intercooler that I was thinking about is something like that of the Ferrari. It does not go to the front, although, putting it in the front would cool better.

My intake manifold is in the front, therefor, the pipe is super short.

Intercooler and the front intake setup is very different. The intercooler is made off 100% aluminum with fins, the fins will cool the air. The intake is just cotton filter and no alumninum fins. My OEM setup is like that already. I will try this on my day off, assuming I can find one in the junkyard or japanese use auto shop. or I will order the canister intercooler, like that of the Ferrari.

 

Neat idea.
I don't think an intercooler is the right way to go about it though.
An intercooler will add a significant restriction to the intake flow. More restriction than the drop in temperature would overcome.
If you want to cool the charge down, do a cold air intake with aluminum piping like most on the market. Maybe try ducting air over the pipe. Maybe figure out a way to add fins to the outside of that pipe.
Handata sells an intake manifold gasket that removes heat from the manifold.
For every 10 degrees you cool the intake charge air, you gain 1% power.

 

Oh... heat removal intake gaskets... I"ll try that.

I think the way that the intake works for the SOHC is it rely on some restrictions to create pressure.

I have a friend that add an intake off of his prelude (don't know why), I guess he wanted to save money. Anyways, the intake pipe was connected to the box with the original filter removed. The torque and hp droped like crazy and it was the biggest disappointment ever.

Plastic cools better than thin aluminum. I think I should get my intake and exhaust manifolds ceramic coated for heat purposes. But I am still going to the yard for the intercooler on the coming tuesdays or Wednesday. I'll keep you guys posted.

 

I didn't read the replies... so excuse me if this has been posted.

Radiators and intercoolers cause a pressure drop... nuff said!

Ok, maybe some ppl won't understand:

when boosting, the act of compressing the air (or compressing any fluid) causes the fluid to heat up due to agitation at the molecular level. It's not cuz the exhaust turbine is right there, though that's a small part of it. So since the air is heated up from compression, atmosphere air is still cooler, so if you run an air to air heat exchanger, you will lower intake temps back to a reasonable level.

When normally aspirated, the only change in air temperature from the air coming in to the throttle body is the heat soak from the intake pipe itself. If you introduce an intercooler into the line, the intercooler may drop the temps 1-2 degrees, which is a 0.000001 hp difference LOL but now the engine has a restriction through which it has to draw air... think of it this way... you wanna drink your pop... you have the choice of one straw or 10 straws at 1/10th the diameter of the normal straw.... what would you take - one normal size or 10 super small ones??? Bottom line is, intercoolers are responsible for a 1-2 psi drop when boosting (which is why BIGGER I/C IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER!!!) and that kind of inefficiency is unacceptable for an engine that basically boils down to being an air pump. Only way to make that work would be a air to dry ice kind of intercooler where you can drop temps significantly and increase oxygen content to make up the loss in volume, pressure and velocity of the intake charge. This applies to those FMCAI as well.

 

Oh yeah, you are right about bigger intake not better, but rrestriction is also not good... how would you like to breathe with a bag loosely over your head.

 

I would think it would help....it's the Petlier effect (I think thats what is called). Those coolers that they sell at Crappy Tire use this method to cool the inside of the box, to keep pop cold. A small fan blows over the aluminium fins, which then get cold, which in turn transfers the cold to the inside of the box. As long as the inlet and out let of the intercooler is big enough not to restrict the air flow, and there is a constant air flow through the fins, I could see it helpling out. Right now, most cars with the short air intakes seem to bog in hot weather....why you way ask? Well, the intake is sucking in hot air.

I've seen intercoolers that have little to no restriction that would probably help out.

Anyone have one so I can test this theory?

 

I think it might work but only with a air to water cooler thats like packed with ice or something .... and combined with hondata gasket to keep engine heat from going up the pipes to the air to water cooler.... but then again this is NA we are talking about so .. whats the point??

 

anything to help keep my car from bogging when I have the ac on, and I stuck in trafic.

 

PULOVR, good theroy, not true in practice. Manipulating air takes away velocity, and that's not good. Any time you redirect air (or anything for that matter), energy is lost.

 

Who cares about velocity or pressure drop. How are you cooling this air with more air that's the same temperature?

You have hot summer air being sucked into the intake passing through an intercooler which is supposedly being cooled by what? More hot summer air. Unless you have something cool like ice to cause some cooling effect, then you're drawing in the same temperature air no matter how many intercoolers you have.

In short ambient temp = intercooler temp = air temp before intercooler, will equal air temp after intercooler.

Peltier is a thermoelectric principle. You can use electrical peltier devices to cool the intake charge, but they would require more power to run than you would receive from the cool air properties..

 

http://www.interlog.com/~ask/scale/wip/f40.htm

I got the idea from TV, when they were showing a program on Speedchannel on the F40. The metioned the twin intercooler, but never about the Twin SUPERCHARGERS, I just found out that the F40 is only a 3L engine with Twin Superchargers.

 

an engine bogs when it takes in warm air.....fact

air flowing over aluminium will cool the metal.....fact

the air that passes through those aluminium pipes will cool down below the ambiant air temp.....fact

loss of HP due to the curves and exsesive travel though more pipe.....depends on how much of an extensive you put on it.

All I know is when I had my old car, it used to bog ALL the time when it got hot outside. When I extended the pipe to the front grill, the "bog" went away. I might of lost a bit of the lower end torque, but I gained it back in the mid to high end passing speed.

Throtel responce came back.....fact

Now.....take into account a cooler than ambiant air charge when the cooler cools the air a bit, the engine would run smother,and have to work less to have the same HP. In turn, the engine would also not get as hot as before......why......because it's getting a cold/cooler air supply..... fact

the amount of loss/gain in HP when you use a intercooler on a NA car is a give and take thing. I would rather have the engine run cooler and have better gas milage, if it ment I wouuld lose a HP or 2. If it went the other way, and i gained 1 or 2 more....all the better.

3 years of phisics near the top of my class, what do you have? We did a display the last year of school, that took air in on side of a small radiator (made of aluminium), and monitored the air temp both on the inside/inlet, and the outside/outlet of that rad. There was a constant 4-5 degrees cooler temp on the outlet of that rad, when compared to the inlet. There was a small fan blowing air through the fins.....when we turned off the fan, the difference in air temp droped to 1-2.......there was still an improvement, but not as much as before. The air was still being cooled as it passed though the aluminuim fins....not as much as before, but it was still a bit cooler.

The affect that air has on aluminium is a fact....plain and simply. No mater how warm the outside air is, it will always cool to a level a few degrees below the ambiant air temp. Didn't you learn this in school?

 

By the way, if this type of setup didn't work, then why does most, if not all race cars funnel air either though an intercooler, or directly to the throtal body? Plain and simple......any degree you go down on the air going into the engine, has a positive effect on the HP 9/10 times.

The only draw back is that most people wouldn't speed a few hundered $$ just to gain a HP or 2....unless they wanted every bit of power possible out of an engine....in this case, money doen't mater to them.

 

actually I've never heard of this fact.

Can you give me an idea of how this magical heat exchange works. If the aair passing over the metal extracts heat from alluminum, why does the heat passing over the alluminum on the inside of the intercooler not transfer get heat transfered to it as well?

I fail to see how extracting air from a cooler area, rather than the engine bay has anything to do with your intercooler idea. Cooler denser air will make more power, there's no contest about that.

Temperature of the intake charge has an almost immeasurable effect an engine temperature. Air fuel ratio, dynamic compression, and timing have the most control over actual heat produced by the engine. If you want a cooler engine, get a better radiator and lower temp thermostat.

Over 5 years studying race care design, including engine management, geometry, thermal dynamics, fluid dynamics.

Can you link to some kind of reference to the magic thermal properties that you state aluminum has?

No NA racecar that I've ever seen, and I've seen alot, has ever used an air to air heat exchanger (intercooler). A full out NA car will usually run air horns to the throttle bodies, inside an air box, the length and diameter of the horns are ram tuned based on the engine characteristics.

 

Hey... this is what I know. When it is hot out side and I don't want to turn the air conditioning on. I turn my fan on, for some reason, oh... wait, it's called magical air, it some how cools my room. Now, I don't understand how this magical cool air cools the room, according to some ppl, air temp is relative to the surrounding air, and there is only one temp with flowing or no air, it is the same.

Oh... one more thing.... those stupid guys at Pentium and AMD company are sticking fans on my ALUMINUM processor, they think their so ******* smart - according to some ppl, you can't get magical air (cool air). The weight of the ALUMINUM thing and the fan is weighing my computer down, so that is why I think it is so slow, my processor needs to loose some weight.... Vroom....go P4 racer. Same for those Amps....etc..... what are ppl thinking with ALUMINUM fins, it does not cool, right - all that weight...thhhhh...

Never said that the intercooler would give a 10hp like the mufflers that some company claimed or the performance intakes.

I have also used the "air horn" on my civic, I took the right headlight out and it goes there, and yes, big diff... depends on size, in this case going a bit bigger is better.