Intercooler - Explained

hello everyone and welcome in today's video I'm going to be explaining intercoolers now this particular intercooler is a Boram plate style air-to-air intercooler courtesy of yanaka motorsports so I will include a link in description if you want to check out the actual product and I'll get more into what that means air-to-air and borin plate design in this video so first I want to talk about well what is the purpose of an intercooler so the purpose of an intercooler is to reduce the intake air charge temperature so if you're going to have a turbocharged or supercharged engine and you're going to have say 15 psi of boost going into that engine you would rather have 15 psi of cold air than 15 psi of hot air because that cooler air is going to carry more oxygen and allow you to burn more fuel and thus create more power it's also going to be less likely to combust before you'd like it to since the temperature is initially lower so let's start to talk about kind of what an air-to-air intercooler is what it means this is a bar and plate style intercooler so an air-to-air intercooler means that you're using your ambient air in order to cool the air of the intake charge so what we've got going on here is here's our engine here's our turbocharger it could be a supercharger also and here's our intercooler and this is our system setup so we've got our cool air coming into the intake of the turbocharger now as air compresses as you squeeze that air down it heats it up you're also going to have a little bit of heat from the exhaust side of the turbocharger heating that Inlet air so once the air comes past and has been compressed it's going to be heated up so you're going to have hot compressed air that you're going to be sending to the engine so you don't want hot compressed air so that's where this intercooler comes in so you have air passed through the front of the intercooler and out the back of the intercooler and inside you've got your intake charges going from hot you can see your in red to cool air the other type of inter cooling system you may find that is an air to water inter cooling system once again it can be done with the turbocharged or supercharged application for this I've drawn a turbocharger so an air an air to water intercooler is using water to cool the intake air charge so it works a little bit differently I'm so same idea where we have the intake with of the turbocharger you can press that air it heats it up and then you want to send that air to the engine so instead of sending it directly to the engine it first passes through this intercooler and in this intercooler you have a channel of water flowing so at the front of your car you have this radiator and this radiator is the ambient air is passing through it and heating up and as it passes through it you have this pump pumping fluid so the hot fluid is going to come in on one side and then as that ambient air cools it you'll have cool liquid coming out the other side so that cool liquid will go to a second radiator system basically and so you will pass the intake air over top of these cooling fins connected to these this cooling circuit here and so that's going to cool down the air that's coming in for the intake charge so you'll have the hot air compressed coming in and then you'll have cool compressed air coming out and going to your engine so this air to water intercooler is going to look a little bit different because basically you're going to have your intake charge going through this side of the intercooler and you're going to have a coolant running through this side of the intercooler and one of the things that you can do with a narrow water intercooler is you could take out this front mounted radiator and instead you could just kind of put an ice chest or reservoir in there and so you could be pumping ice water through the intercooler and that'd be good for applications where you're not running the car very long for example like a drag racing or perhaps like a hot lap a single lap task where you're not using the carpet very long and you just need a coolant as much as possible and by doing that by using a water chest filled with ice and having colder water then you can actually get the compressed air to be cooler than the outside air temperature so let's talk about the pros and cons of air to air vs. air to water so when air-to-air intercooler typically the system is going to be a lower weight it's less complex and it's going to be cheaper than in the info era war intercooling system however on the flip side era water systems typically it can be more effective and they also have a decreased pressure loss since the intake is actually much closer to the engine and you're not running it through this complex route of through the intake down through the front of the car and then back all the way to the engine you can kind of place the intake much closer to the engine and have a shorter distance so that your pressure loss through the system is less so I also mentioned that this is a barn plate style intercooler and so basically that just has to do with a construction here so it has these plates stacked on top of each other and that's just how it's constructed versus a tube and fin so looking internally the air flowing in through this direction it's going to kind of look like this for a barn plate where you have these different sections where the intake charge can pass through verses these extruded tubes which a tube and finn-style intercooler would use for the intake charge to go through so here's just a quick look inside of the barn plate style intercooler and this is what the intake charge would be passing through so now the pros and cons of bar and plate versus a tubing finn-style typically the barn plate is going to have it's going to be a stronger intercooler can hit a little bit more views higher pressure boost levels and it also is typically going to have greater cooling that said the tube and fin it's typically going to weigh less it's typically going to cost quite a bit less due to the manufacturing process and it's going to have less of a pressure drop now less of a pressure drop means you're going to have more air to flow to for example if you have a radiator behind it you have more air flowing to that but no it's not going to have the cooling but a barn plate might have so finally I just would want to talk a little bit about the design of inner coolers overall so one thing to take into consideration is the thin density both passing through the intake charge path and passing through the outside on the ambient air path so the fin density as you increase that you're going to have more cooling obviously but as you have more cooling you're going to be slowing down the air more and you're going to have a greater pressure drop from one side of the intercooler to the other so you're not going to have quite as great air flow through it and also the pressure from here to here is going to decrease decent amount so if you have it really restricted you may be you may be able to provide high boost levels with your turbocharger but if it's too restrictive you won't have that high boost after the intercooler so that's one thing to keep in mind also another thing to keep in mind changing the height of the intercooler this is great because you're going to increase the cooling of it and typically most of the cooling is done right here so as the length of this increases it's not going to be that much more effective because the difference in the temperature between ambient air and the compressed air isn't that great so when the temperature difference is small you're not going to cool it much more versus when the temperature difference is very high you will cool a lot more so having a high intercooler allows you to maximize that point where the air is very hot and the outside air is very cool and you can clash those two temperatures together and get better overall cooling from the intercooler that said you can't just make this really tall intercooler because the size of its enormous and it's just not going to fit in vehicle applications and then finally the thickness of it so like I was saying size can be a problem so you can make the intercooler thicker have the air passed through it more and although that allows you to use a smaller size it's going to decrease your air flow through the intercooler so you're going to have a greater pressure loss and you're not going to have quite as creative cooling for your radiator which typically is going to be behind the intercooler so thanks for watching feel free to check out the links in the video description and if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 757,988

Rating: 4.9129257 out of 5

Keywords: intercooler, turbo intercooler, air to air intercooler, bar and plate intercooler, air to water intercooler, air to air vs air to water, tube and fin intercooler, bar and plate vs tube and fin, how it works, increased efficiency, engineering explained, yonaka intercooler, garrett intercooler, greddy intercooler, spearco intercooler

Id: 6nhLE1LI2BQ

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2013