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I was tossing an idea around with some of my students last year about an intercooler design for a cramped engine bay...
Essentially, one would still use the cold side tubing in a typical turbo setup but would eliminate the "tank" intercooler and run straight tubing in it's place.
The intercooler idea I'm contemplating is essentially a common idea in hot water tank heat exchangers using a coiled liquid filled tubing run the entire length of the cold side tubing from turbo outlet to throttle body.
Something like this tubing coiled inside the charge piping, sort of like a spring in a can.
The air would flow through this spiraled cold aluminum tubing and heat sink.
Obviously you would still need a heat exchanger to cool the water after it runs through the coils and soaks up the heat from the air in the charge pipe, but this heat exchanger could be thinner and smaller and possibly have a dedicated fan and be placed somewhere else in the vehicle.
In a fantasy world, the coiled tubing could be filled with something other than water like a refrigerant that would get super cold under pressure, with a dedicated electric compressor.
Just a thought I was throwing around to help out the sleeper-devoted crowd...
Feel free to throw me some constructive criticism, especially if you're an engineer.
^^^ My thaughts exactly.
Those types of heat exchangers are not meat to heat/cool @ high volumes of water flow. That's why heater cores/radiators/ATW intercoolers have very thin areas of liquid and a high tube to fin contact area to dissapate very quickly. I do give you props for trying to think outside the box. : )
My initial thought would be not enough surface area for how fast the air is going to be traveling past it.
That was my initial thought too... but these double coils routed over what could be 4-6 feet of tubing may calculate out to more than the standard plate and fin intercoolers. I also think that the reduction in surface area could be alleviated by the fact that this is a air to water system and not an air to air.
Maybe I should do some calculations and see what an average air to water intercooler amounts to as far as surface area. This may be a pretty simple system to build and test.
I would just do simple calcs on what your desired output Temp is, and factor how much heat you need to shed and assuming some realistic inlet Temp. If you can do that delta with the surface area you have without needing some absurd delta across it, try it out in real life.
what would the coils be made out of? and how would they be secured in the cold side piping? I also give you credit for thinking outside the box, ideas like these are fun to ponder.
filling them with a refrigerant is another cool idea. I think I read somewhere awhile back where someone had an idea like that.
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what would the coils be made out of? and how would they be secured in the cold side piping? I also give you credit for thinking outside the box, ideas like these are fun to ponder.
filling them with a refrigerant is another cool idea. I think I read somewhere awhile back where someone had an idea like that.
At first consideration, I'd say the coils would be aluminum. In my head I imagine rubber isolators placed occasionally to keep the coils floating in the pipe but also from banging against the inside of the piping and rubbing a hole and causing a leak.
Nice idea, but there is insufficient surface area to pull the heat out the air. Also the airflow around those coils would not be great!
The refrigerant idea could be better as you have a higher delta T between the boosted air and the cooler. However you would need a MASSIVE AC ink to remove that kind of heat! Stock car stuff dose not have the capacity. Guys have tried it with the killer chiller (cooling water in a conventional air to water setup). It would take several min of driving around to cool the water down to around ambient. You wouldn't have the luxury of that same thermal mass as what they had!
There are already some pretty compact ideas out there. LPE has an intercooler intake manifold that's very neat. Frozen boost have some interesting shaped cores that look liked squared off PWR barrel coolers.
The thing to remember is you can't get anything for nothing in this world. You you want cool intakes you have to put suitable sized coolers in there. On and air to water that means on both sides to!
Maybe it worth to build 2 stage intercooler
first stage is to reduce temperature to ambient with air to air intercooler.
second stage is to drop from ambient to lowest possible with freon to air intercooler.
Keep in mind you would have to cool down 300+ degs air in a short time (distance).
Back in my old super stock days, we used a cool can, fuel ran thru a coil inside a can
filled with ice. I had thought at one time cooling the fuel might help, but with the higher
vol of fuel for fuel inj. prob wouldnt work. I was thinking of rem. my A/A IC'er once, replacing
it with about 3' of straight pipe. If there was some way of externally attaching fins (like a
heat syn trans cooler) it might draw away some heat, but prob not enough to help.
They have those nitrous spray bars for IC'ers, but we run boost so we dont need nitrous, lol.
08-17-2015, 12:42 PM
Idea for a compact air to water intercooler... 
