allminesl550

Yeah, watching this show on tv, they're adding a blower to a 572 chevy hoping for like 1500 horsies, I noticed the intercooler comes in AFTER the blower (heats the air!) and I thought - "why not PRE-COOL the air before entering the blower? Get your degree drop in ADVANCE, then the blower sees very cold air, you can design the system so the engine draws similar temp air to the post-intercooler method or perhaps even cooler, and you've managed to completely eliminate very high post-blower temps that normally heat up and have detrimental effects on all metal parts and performance."

I have no idea how MB does it but maybe this could work out better.
Anyone?
Am i missing something?

whoover

Huh? The heat comes from the charge being compressed. The intercooler (more precisely charge cooler) cools it back down towards ambient air temperature. An intercooler is not a refrigeration unit. It exchanges heat from the charge to coolant and then heat from the coolant through a radiator to the air. If it worked at 100% efficiency (and it can't) it could only cool the charge back down to ambient temperature.

So problem number one for your suggestion is that you would need a refrigeration unit which takes power to drive, adds weight and will have problems of its own. Problem number two is that the supercharger can heat the charge as much as 150 degrees above ambient. An effective intercooler can drop maybe 120 degrees of this. To get the equivalent drop you would have to chill the air to like 50 below zero! Needless to say, that would take the mother of all refrigeration units. Plus, such cold air would wreak havoc on the system. You'd probably ice up your supercharger.

To summarize, it's a lot easier to cool hot stuff down to room temperature than cool room temperature down to Antarctica.

allminesl550

Very interesting. I had no idea we were talking about a 150 degree shift, thats quite a bit. Let me ask you, say you use or build and use a good intercooler, to drop air running, I dont know, maybe 90 degrees under the hood, just room air but under the hood, and you put this 90 degree air through this well designed intercooler, question: How many degree drop would be possible? (without any large refrigs, ok)?

Can it be brought down on the output side to say maybe 40 degrees
(a 50 F-degree drop roughly) ?

Thanks in advance, car genius.

Damn! got what looks like a degree symbol here sharing a key with > symbol but how in blazes do i bring it up into this box?

whoover

50°. Does that display? It probably depends on what OS you're using since the degree sign is not standard in all character sets.

Again, an intercooler can't cool lower than ambient air temperature. If the air under the hood is 90° and the outside temp is 70°, maybe you can get to 80° with a very efficient intercooler. In the real world, you probably can't cool down at all, because the coolant temperature will have a tough time getting lower than 90° because of the same underhood temperature that heated the initial charge air.

PS. You can use Character Map in Windows to copy and paste special characters.

AdamG@NorCal

Yes whoover is accurate. The intake air temperature is always above ambient temp.

allminesl550

Ya, I dig it now. So it seems that engines with compressors typically process warmer air than do your equivalent naturally aspirated motor, like 30 to 50 degrees warmer, right. Now that cant be good for either the charge potential or the life of the motor. The colder the air the greater the power as a rule.

Has anyone designed a compressed system that delivers intake air at ambient temp?

So I'll guess that with turbos the situation is worse, intake air is even hotter. Do you know how hot on MB's v12?

Thanks! You must build cars or something.

ps Some of my keys contain 3 and 4 characters, but of course i only have access to 2 at the moment.

bbearden

There is a way to cool below ambient air temp using an intercooler and that is through use of cryogenics. There are a number of manufacturers who make kits that use either carbon dioxide or nitrous oxide in a spray bar to spray across the cooling fins of the intercooler. I've heard mixed results with these setups but have heard of power increases up to 50 HP.