You are only looking to drop the presure slightly. Not enough volume of air to do any cooling. As said the WRC system are not loss systems as all the air is used, its presure is just changed. Plus if you did use the air to cool the intercooler you would be loosing compresor flow for cooling, might as well just fit a decent sized electric fan!

On that note, have you actually thought avbout what gose on with an uintercooller, or any radiator for that matter? I think most people overlook the ambient air flow when modding cars, thus why cars run hot!

If you look at a car you have a nice large opening at the front where you mount the rad. This rad has cold dense air from the front of the car ducted to it. What is actually happening while you are driving down the road is air is stacking up in from of the rad causing a slight high presure area. Once this high presure area is of higher presure than the engine bay area (back side of rad) and suffucent to overcome the resistance of the rad core irtself then air will flow through the core.

So how can we maximise the airflow through the rad / intercooler / AC?

1) You need to feed the front of the intercooler / rad with as much high presure air as you can
2) ensure that this air has to go through the core(s) and not around it
3) reduce the air preusre in the engine compartment - vented hood is a good example of this
4) review the cores used

1) is pretty easy. Look to open up areas in form of the rad to force as much air as you can to the face of the rad. Srouding the front of the rad is another good way to ensure the air stacks up and dosen't just spill out.

2) is linked to 1) really. You want to esure that the srouding is sufficent and tight enough that air can not simply flow around the core. air dose not flow through rads with no restriction and thus will try and find any way around the cor eit can. You need to ensure that the air has no ways of getting around the core.

3) If you look at ALMS cars you will see they have MASSIVE vents in the hoods. These are usually ducts that attch to the back of the rads and lift the air to the meet the air flowing over the hood. This offers the lowest presure after the rad and also helps with airflow over the rest of the car. Now this obviously isn't easy or pratical to do on a road car (esp with the rad slnated backwards) but you can still look to reduce engine bay presure as much as possiable. Block of vents that aren't needed or aren't feeding air to the rad. look at ways to get the air out of the engine bay area. vent the hood.

4) As mentioned above radiator cores are not free flowing and pose restriction to the flow of ambient air. The thicker the core the more restiction. Also the core type and design used will alter the ambient airflow through the core. Sticking a 6inch thick intercooler in front of the AC and rad cores obviously inst going to help the flow of the air to the rad either! a compound effect is the intercooler will be heating the air up even more reducing its ability to pull heat out of the rad! So you stick and even thicker rad on there which restricts the flor even more. So you need to think about maybe moving the IC away from the rad or even installing fans on the back side of the IC to help maintain airflow over the IC core. Using thinner core but with a greater surface area will also restrict flow less but still flow the same (IC or Rad).

Chris.

 

Sorry for the necrobump, this thread came up in a search and this comment was bothering me. Air weighs about .075 lbs per cubic foot at normal temperature and pressure. The reason it doesn't intuitively seem to weigh anything is that it is the same density as, and thus neutrally buoyant in the surrounding air, but that can easily change with changes in temperature (which is how hot air balloons work), or pressure. It's the same concept as jumping in a pool. An average to thin person is fairly close to neutrally buoyant, will sink with empty lungs and float with full lungs. That doesn't make them weightless.

However, when you compress air to high pressures (and cool it back to ambient temps) like for example within a 300 bar high pressure tank, the same volume weighs approximately 300x as much. A 1 cubic foot tank would increase in weight by approximately 22.5 lbs when filled to 300 bar with air. The weight of the air is typically about half the weight of a full high pressure tank.

 

Have you looked into compressed air "supercharging"? Impressive, not very practical, but Impressive.