Ill be honest with you. I do. I take turbocharging very seriously. It one point it was my job!
What has been seen cannot be unseen! 
Hope you saw it!
thats great and all… a ton of information that directly relates to turbocharged car applications…
but I think your mixing up your high $$ turbo setup from your job to my D-series honda. The things that are important to you and who ever you work for might not be the top priority for my setup.
In other news, hardlines are the shit. If I have time I want to setup my vac lines up properly with bent hardlines.
in for more info in intercoolers
1320, school me on end tanks.
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
^ +rep, for sure
I’m actually learning a lot here.
so, 1320, tell me- i hear that running twin side mount intercoolers in a car like mine is better than a single fmic. Is this true because of intercooler design like you mentioned with the vertical shorter cores to minimize pressure drop versus a skinny and long intercooler or is it simply because its twin turbo?
I’m not so sure about that. What kind of car do you have?
The main problem with dual series intercoolers is that the second one does not do as much as you would think it would.
The difference in temperature between the ambient air and the charge air on the first intercooler is a significant amount. The hotter the air going into the intercooler, the more cooling you will get out of it. Although you will only approach ambient temperature asymptotically. This is easily explained with numbers.
Your turbo puts out 300F air. and its 70 degrees outside. Lets say for arguments sake that each intercooler removes 75% of the heat.
IC1: 300F-70F = 230F Delta.
230F delta x (1-.75) = 172.5F removed.
Or 127.5F leaving that IC.
IC2: 127.5F-70F = 57.5F Delta.
57.5 x (1-.75) = 43 degrees removed.
Or 84 degrees leaving that second intercooler.
Even though this is a idealized linear example, you can still see that the first intercooler is doing 4 times as much cooling as the second intercooler. This all goes back to thermal conductivity, and the RATE of cooling.
In reality this rate is not this simple, and I suspect that the the numbers would be even worse.
Of course the second intercooler DOES still remove 43 degrees. It still is cooling your air, it certainly will not hurt you. It will have a pressure drop, so you will need more pressure coming out of the turbo to have the same pressure in the manifold where it matters. This will of course produce more heat out of the turbo causing the need for more cooling.
So the short answer is yes, series intercoolers are better than one stock sidemount.
But the long answer is not so clear. Would this be better than one bigger front mount? I’m not so sure I can answer that question with absolute certainty.
It is possible the cooling may be the same, but the front mount would have less pressure drop, giving it a slight edge. But im not positive.
Twin sidemounts in parallel would be better. Especially if you had a twin turbo car like an S4 where you could run totally seperate systems.
I have the same motor as the S4. it’s the 2.7T but I drive an A6. The intercoolers are separate from each other. Theyre not inline one after another. It’s one per turbo and then the charge pipe comes into a Y pipe and goes into the throttle body. theyre the V shaped ones not the ==== shaped ones.
1320 +rep for teaching me somthing.
So I guess I dont understand your question then. If you have a 2.7 TT you must have two intercoolers already in paralell.
Were you looking to go with a front mount? Whats your manifold temperature now?
It may be way simpler for you to go with pressure activated water injection. This will work A LOT better than a front mount, and be staggeringly less expensive.
You might also want to look into aftermarket ducts to better feed your existing cores.
You could go with the APR dual RS4 intercooler kit but its $1300 :banghead
1.5 psi less pressure drop is advertised.
You would have to make your own plumbing and make it all work, as these are for the S4. I imagine you would have more room though??
Also there is this AWE kit for you. And a nice thread here with pics and graphs.
http://www.audizine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=235580
I would still go water injection. Much simpler, and better performance.
I eventually would like to get lots of RS4 bits for my motor and just run that. Startign with simpler things and gradually getting more complex. I looked at AWE and APR’s kits, theyre quite nice and people swear by them, but the price tag is rather steep, just like you said. As far as water injection systems go, what is their main benefit? Do they help lower the temperature of the air coming out of the turbo making it more dense?
Density temperature and volume are all inter-related.
So yes, the water cools the air, and it will become more dense (smaller) but you wont get any more boost from that.
But it will work as good or better than a front mount for WAY less money.
Basically you would install a water misting nozzle After your intercooler on both sides, and the water would cool off whatever your IC didn’t take care of.
Something like this:
http://www.snowperformance.net/product.php?pk=58
oh, this sprays water INTO the piping? I thought these mist cool water onto the cores. Interesting.
+10 on injection. It’s the way to go with utmost certainty in my opinion. I don’t think I’d personally run a turbocharged car of my own without it as the benefits per dollar cost of the systems are far worth it. Can be done on the cheap too with the Labonte systems.
Todd @ AWE is good people and makes some super nice intercoolers for VAG and Porsche.
AWE 996 Turbo sidemounts:
IAT/Ambient comparison of AWE vs stock(996 turbo)
Good quality stuff.
I’m still trying to find who makes the cores for these custom made 996 coolers. The core manufacture is supposed to be some UK based company, damned if I can locate anything on them.
Makes me want to go water injected now. Would I have to buy two systems or have one line split?