Chargecooler \ Air-Water intercooler

[Steve Webb]

Right, pondering the question of intercooler size last night and thumbing through a couple of books, a thought struck me.
Instead of trying to shoehorn a larger IC in there, why not go down the chargecooler \ air:water IC route.
I've moved the battery to the boot so now have plenty of space for the chargecooler, and the aircon is out so I have the possibility of using the aircon rad as the rad for the system. Not checked out the logistics of the system yet, but it seems possible at the moment.

Anyone else thought about this?

[jNk]

I thought about it 3 years ago and sent a mail to AVT / chargecooler.co.uk.

Davids answer to my question which was a chargecooler install without any serious upgrade (turbo or engine internals) for spirited road / occasionally track use :

"It depends how good your existing intercooler is. If airflow is a problem then the CC may be better. It will have less lag, and will be very good for drag racing if that is what you may use it for.

But if you find your intercooler is very good, you may not get much gains from going to the chargecooler.

Regards

David"

[Steve Webb]

Cheers for that reply, I've been down and taken a look at the old aircon radiator and it just isn't up to the job of being used as the water radiator part of the system.
Still keep on a chargecooler as fitting a larger IC will be a compromise.

[#84]

I have also thought about it and have a fantastic charge air cooler, however with a steel core, so a bit heavy. The water cooling shouldn't be a big deal. Any aluminium small size radiator would be fine. The boring part is to control it. Ideal would be to vary flow with temperature.

You should take a look at the first series of Focus RS and the Lotus Esprit V8 twinturbo. Especially the first one is similar to the Q4. Maybe you could buy spare parts or parts from a scrapped one? Theoretically it is a drawback with an additional circuit which steals energy with its pump and steal temperature approach because of the two additional heat transfers that needs to take place. However, since the peak load on the intercooler is high and so called heat soak is a known problem a charge air cooler gains from:

A. System inertia - It doesn't heat up that much during peak load
B. The air cools more or less all the time, since the system accumulates cooling effect.

One day I should go for it ...

[Steve Webb]

I'm pretty sure a few Lotus chargecoolers came onto the market a few years back and were snapped up by the Integrale boys. Seemed like a pretty good solution.
I've seen pics of the early Focus chargecoolers and weren't they a combined Inter\chargecooler?

I get over the heat soak issue by having an intelligent waterspray system, it runs the pump even after the boost has passed through the system, and the more boost you use, the longer the pump runs for.

I was thinking about the Chargecooler to improve the flow through the inlet rather than for its improved temperature stability, although that is a nice side effect.

Like you, when I get some spare funds, its something I'm going to go for.

[#84]

The Lotus on, by Behr, is really good. I am quite sure the Focus solution is water only. I have pictures - somewhere ...

Another alternative is water injection. A friend installed the Aquamist system in his Punto GT with 8k rev cams and Mitsubishi turbo (Saab 9-5 Aero). The worked very well.

But when it comes to water injection there are soooo many interesting and positive side effects. We can take that discussion another time. The drawbacks are freezing (winter), water quality, pump energy consumption and the massive detonation risk if something fails.