Why have I never seen a liquid to air intercooler setup on an all motor drag car with ice water in the bath? It would be nice to have 50 degree intake air temps on a 105 degree day. Just wondering if anyone has done this, I sold my turbo car with a liquid to air setup and the owner is now all motor and I mentioned trying it next year and seeing how it works since everything is still in the car and mounted.

 

it wouldn't be difficult to test this, thats for sure.

Seems like someone would have done it already.

 

the temps might drop, but it would be a huge restriction for the inake to draw from...

 

If the core was big enough do you think it would really restrict the flow too much? On a turbo car you are usually moving double to triple the air and psi drops are very minimal.

 

It could, and should work as long as the core has enough surface area to not have a pressure drop, which wouldn't be hard with that amount of airflow.

 

If you were to face the cores like an intercooler and have some type of ducting directing flow pre-cooler then it should work pretty well.

It will be a trade off though because you'll be adding about 30-50lbs of equipment.

 

I can see a new Tony1 design coming.......

 

this was a topic i brought in in my early days on HT and dayum near got laughed off the forum. It would be an interesting idea. Hopefully someone trys it and reports back. Cold air would go a long way for NA cars.

 

Yeah I was waiting for a flaming, I am going to give it a try next year since it's all already installed. I just hope the intercooler he has is large enough but some map sensor datalogging will answer that.

 

y not just do a water/meth setup. it will drop the iats a ton with no air resection

-alex

 

I don't think water injection or methanol would be considered legal in all motor classes and I would almost consider that a poweradder and not an all motor car at that point.

 

im not sure if it will work. but i remember seeing it back in the day. a few local guys made removeable sealed boxes they put around there intake piping and they laid dry ice in the boxes and around the tubing.

and i seen that they use to run there fuel lines through a Can they called a Fuel Cooler.

Just a couple idea's not sure how beneficial it will tho.

 

I think that a good design for removing heat will also be good at causing a pressure drop.

 

I can say that a single garrett '1000hp' a/w core has between .5-.75psi drop across the core at 900+ hp. At lower boost the pressure drop that I measure is close enough that it could easily just be sensor variances. So at 400whp, I think it could be low enough to have no pressure drop.

 

This is a good point, probably can be done sucessfully and see gains. However would the gains be offset by the added weight of the core, piping, pump, lines, small res., etc.

You could minimize some of that weight by maybe running a dry ice only cooled setup? Random thought.

 

Most all motor classes have a minimum weight don't they, so the weight would have to be lost somewhere else to even it back out. And if someone was not in a class I think the added weight wouldn't be bad considering the consistency you would get from it. It will be fun to play with.

 

funny how in this forum people are like "yah its a good idea" and in the all motor forum they are like "wtf that is so stupid"
lol

i would think somebody with a pro car has tried this, but maybe not. i have thought about it before but never had the money to try it out i guess.

you think you would gain .5% per 10 degree temp drop?

 

this is known as a "Cool Can"

haha

 

I have also noticed that the people in the drag race section are a little brighter than other sections, for instance this is a response in the all motor section

"somebody locally tried it on a gsr but it was a regular intercooler.
you could feel the lost of power"

 

LOL

 

IIRC a few years ago at sema chevy had an NA land speed Cobalt with a co2 coil in the middle of their intake pipe to cool the incoming air..

 

this has been discussed and tested on my end and you will not get the drop in temp that you want..... you will get the same results from paying a bag of ice on your intake manifold in the staging lanes and removing it right before the run.....

 

i've wondered this very thing myself. but I don't do all motor.

 

That seems weird to me since you can cool down compressed air which is around two times hotter to the 50-60 degree range and you are moving more of it. Ice on the intake wouldn't get much surface area for the air to cool down in my opinion. What temp drops were you getting with both?

 

Yeah, I agree. If we can cool 350+ deg air to 60 degrees, then I don't see why we can't cool 90 deg air to 60 deg.

The reality is that it will only cool so much with ice water as the cooling medium. On a cool day, it would have very little advantage. I don't think you'll get the air cooler than about 55 deg. On my race car at low boost, where comp outlet temps are down, it will get to the mid 50's. Then again, that's with 200 deg ish outlet temps. Maybe with 90 deg IC inlet temps the outlet temps will get lower, probably not though. The ice water in my tank usually averages 45 degrees or so.