I’m still highly irritated you quoted my first post and then debated its technical merit! :facepalm
Then you Neg repped me! :wtf
But I will forget about that, as long as you at least google before disagreeing! :hug
End tanks:
- Not nearly as important as the core.
As always it is important to know the significance of each parts contribution to the performance as a whole. If i was going to try to improve an intercooler I would try to improve two things:
A. The heat transfer (90%)
B. The pressure drop (10%)
Heat transfer is complex. Actually I wont pretend to be an expert in heat transfer, as I wont have even taken that class until this upcoming semester. I have taken Thermodynamics, the precursor to heat transfer. However heat transfer while mathematically complicated is not logically complex. A few analogies will explain it all quite well.
How to burn yourself! :wow
Touch something HOTTER than you! Heat always flows from hot to cold. Heat never flows in the opposite direction. Now did you get burned? maybe, maybe not.
That depends on the delta temperature. Touch a hot cup of coffee, you will be irritated but not injured. hold your hand in a propane flame, and you will be a LOT more upset.
But you can fling your hand thru a flame real quick and get away with it. This is excellent for impressing the ladies, but why? The answer to this is conductivity, and specific heat.
Things are getting really complex already, but ill try to keep it simple. An oven mit is ceramic fiber. ceramics have low conductivity, which means they take a long time to pick up heat. This does NOT mean they cannot get hot, actually they do that quite well, they just take a lot longer to get there. If you give something an infinite amount of time, thermal conductivity is irrelevent.
So what does this have to do with your intercooler? Everything. Your boost air is only in your intercooler for a very short amount of time. So therefore the purpose of your intercooler is to get as much heat out as possible in that short amount of time.
What does this have to do with endtanks? Your endtank does have an small effect on how long that air is in the intercooler. If your endtank is spectacularly shitty and very, very small and narrow, you will have an uneven pressure distribution on the end of the core.
Since pressure controlls the velocity of the air thru the core, the high pressure tubes will have air flowing thru them faster than optimum. And very little air will flow thru the other tubes at low pressure. This is like waving your hand thru the torch flame. the air will go thru, but it will not have enough TIME to cool off. Now you will have hot and cold air mixing after the intercooler, leaving you with lukewarm. Now like I said this requires a lot of mass flow, and really shitty end tanks.
The purpose of that copper core and DLC discussion Adam and I had is because thermal conductivity of the core has a LOT more effect on your cooling than the endtanks do. Do does material thickness. Also a much more important factor when time is involved. This is explained here if you want to know more about hte relationship of heat flow thickness, conductivity, specific heat, and time:
If you wanted to do anything to improve YOUR particular intercooler, you should have first spent your money on a high quality core. Not nececarilly an expensive one, but a GOOD one. Bell and Garrett make nice cores. You might be able if your very lucky to find some used copper core somewhere and adapt it. Perhaps in a marine environment? They are made, but they are very rare and very expensive. Did i mention expensive?
Another thing I would do is make sure the pressure drop is a the minimum. This involves making you intercooler tube LENGTH as short as possible. This means going to vertical flow. You simply might not have the room to make this happen, but there is a reason I picked a vertical flow IC as my “IDEAL” picture, and that is why. This pressure drop makes your turbo work a bit less hard, and hopefully moves you closer the highest thermal efficiency island of the compressor wheel. Less heat into an intercooler is a good way to make less heat out. However this wont be the huge difference that changing the material would be.
You could also make sure that you maximized the amount of ambient air that flows over the intercooler. I am assuming that the flow over the intercooler is already adaquite, but it is important to have lots of air blowing THRU the core, not just AROUND it. It would be worth your time to make sure the air goes thru the core with some baffling and ductwork instead of around it. For some reason you almost never see this on a street car, and yet ALL care cars do this. There is a reason for that!
This is ideal:
Its copper, air to water, thin, and ducted. Lytron makes FANTASTIC heat exchangers.
Its late im tired, I may add to this at some point but now its too late and im really tired. :thumbup