Intercooler Thoughts

[FireyIce01]

So, I had this interesting idea for a FMIC, and thought I'd run it past all of you and see what you think. I have a friend who works at Airgas, and as such have access to all the cool stuff like liquid oxygen and nitrogen and whatnot. My thought was to have a pair of FMICs mounted one in front of the other, and run the intake charge through the back IC, and run a compressed liquid/gas (with an electric pump constantly running, maybe trunk mounted or something, haven't quite decided how I would run the lines) such as liquid nitrogen (actually said friend suggested propolene glycol, which I'm not sure exactly what is, but is supposed to be similar to a freon) through the front IC, thus allowing the air to be supercooled before it passes through the second intercooler.

At first I was thinking about doing something similar to a water/air IC setup with the liquid nitrogen, but collectively decided that that would cool the intake charge *TOO* much, and wouldn't allow the fuel to atomize, preventing a clean burn (or preventing the engine from firing at all?)

Any thoughts on the idea?

~Jon

 

[IMMORTALSPYDER]

Your car would overheat for sure. There would be almost no air getting to your radiator and A/C. It would be alot easier to install a intercooler cooler from nitrous express or something similar.

 

[coltboostin]

I do not think nitrogen will cool the air too much, the intake charge gets super hot, and even if the air gets 30 deg or more under ambient, it will just make lots of power. The air will not freeze completle like your thinking.

 

[FireyIce01]

yea, was just a ponderance, because the thought behind it was similar to an A/C unit, except that liquid nitrogen is -321 degrees F. Which is why a water to air setup didn't seem like a reliable option, because instead of water you'd be passing the liquid nitrogen through the system... and the surfaces that the air touched apon would be cold enough to actually cause the air to condense and freeze onto the I/C, which in turn would block the path of intake, and what air did make it through would be so cold that the gas wouldnt' be able to atomize. Am I basically right in that presumption?

So, as is the case, what would be a reliable way to make something such as this work properly, because it makes sense to me that the lowwer the intake temperature is, the higher the boost can be without detonation, and I realize there's still a limit to how much a/f mixture you can get into a cylinder, this would allow for a whole lot more than your standard FMIC.

Was just a random thought we were kicking around.

~Jon

 

[kpt4321]

I'll start off by saying this won't work. However, the fact that you thought of the idea at least makes me feel that you guys have a decent grasp on what you want to accomplish with intercooling.

Here are some idea and thoughs on the subject.

First of all, I wouldn't worry too much about cooling the charge air too much. There is a whole hell of a lot of charge air, and not only that but it's pretty freaking warm. Unless you are using an absurd about of liquid nitrogen, you're simply never going to make the charge air cool enough to cause problems.

Second of all, think about this. If you were to set up a system like you suggested, what happens? The front FMIC (nitrogen) cools the ambient air passing through the second intercooler, such that the charge air passing through it gets cooled more. However, this isn't the most efficient way to get extra-cold air to the FMIC, because you have two open devices in an area of fast and possibly turbulent airflow. Not only that, but if you think about it the other way the ambient air is actually heating up your nitrogen.

If you really want to use a sub-ambient device to pull heat out of your charge air, then you should set it up in a closed container such as to minimize the losses. Instead of two intercoolers next to each other, run the charge air through an intercooler and then pass the nitrogen over it by itself (similar to the way you would do an air to water core). This way, you don't have any ambient air heating things up, and you don't waste nitrogen.

Now, I am certainly not saying this is a good idea, but I wanted to give you an example of the sort of thinking you need to use in order to properly maximize a system. The main reason I don't like this idea is you have to cart around a big tank, and then you will use it up quickly. This could work in a car that you wanted to make a lot of power with on the dyno, because weight does not matter and you don't need to run the cooler for a long period of time.

You could calculate the amount of nitrogen you would need per time in boost, if you knew about how much of a charge temp drop you wanted and the mass flow of the charge air.

 

[FireyIce01]

I'll start off by saying this won't work. However, the fact that you thought of the idea at least makes me feel that you guys have a decent grasp on what you want to accomplish with intercooling.

Here are some idea and thoughs on the subject.

First of all, I wouldn't worry too much about cooling the charge air too much. There is a whole hell of a lot of charge air, and not only that but it's pretty freaking warm. Unless you are using an absurd about of liquid nitrogen, you're simply never going to make the charge air cool enough to cause problems.

Second of all, think about this. If you were to set up a system like you suggested, what happens? The front FMIC (nitrogen) cools the ambient air passing through the second intercooler, such that the charge air passing through it gets cooled more. However, this isn't the most efficient way to get extra-cold air to the FMIC, because you have two open devices in an area of fast and possibly turbulent airflow. Not only that, but if you think about it the other way the ambient air is actually heating up your nitrogen.

If you really want to use a sub-ambient device to pull heat out of your charge air, then you should set it up in a closed container such as to minimize the losses. Instead of two intercoolers next to each other, run the charge air through an intercooler and then pass the nitrogen over it by itself (similar to the way you would do an air to water core). This way, you don't have any ambient air heating things up, and you don't waste nitrogen.

Now, I am certainly not saying this is a good idea, but I wanted to give you an example of the sort of thinking you need to use in order to properly maximize a system. The main reason I don't like this idea is you have to cart around a big tank, and then you will use it up quickly. This could work in a car that you wanted to make a lot of power with on the dyno, because weight does not matter and you don't need to run the cooler for a long period of time.

You could calculate the amount of nitrogen you would need per time in boost, if you knew about how much of a charge temp drop you wanted and the mass flow of the charge air.

Well the water to air idea was my first thought, using nitrogen or co2 or something really damn cold and inert, but we literally were thinking to make this a completely closed loop system, having a compressor pumping the liquid through the intercooler as a liquid, in a similar manner to a factory A/C system, but I thought that this would get *too* cold, which is why I figured the dual cores stacked together would be a better idea, though I realize I'd need fairly thin cores, but the more I think about it, the more the water to air version sounds like a better solution, or perhaps have a 3" piping with a 4" piping around it sealed off to allow the liquid nitrogen to cool the outter walls of the pipe to -321 deg. and put one of them tornado fuel saver things in the inlet end to produce a good swirl so that the air gets equally cooled as it passes through.

Let me restate that these were just ideas we were kicking around, and I'm more than likely just going to do a large fmic, but thought it would be interesting to have something that would allow me to litterally shove the most a/f mixture possible into the cylinder, due to the density of the charge.


And as I'm typing this, I've thought of an alternate idea that would me more feasable. Same canister theory as above, made the same length as your FMIC, using clamps or some such thing to mount your intercooler to the hard piping installed in the car so that it's swappable with a standard fmic. Have your nitrous system set up to run through the cylinder (the cooling jacket, not the intake passage) to chill the air, before being plumbed out into your nitrous jets. Not sure if the nitrous would be cold enough to actually provide the cooling that I would expect to see from flowing liquid nitrogen through the cooling jacket though.

I really need to get a good sketch pad so I could draw some diagrams to go with that explanation. Anyway, mostly these are just ideas and theories to kick around, I figure I'd present them, and maybe someone else might have some way to implement them.

 

[Mirage2LTurbo]

If you wanted to do this, I'd get an air to water setup, and substitute the water for some sort of other substance. Somehow supercooling the water in the reservoir would be ver efficient