Just wanted to let the group know how the design of a better cooler is going. I have been doing some research to get to this point and will post the activities as progress lerches forward. It is my intention to also post the temperature differentials as they are recorded to see if there is more in the intake system with a cooler intake charge into the cyclinder.

Photos also include a couple of the cats that are assisting in the grunt work. More to follow. Woody ENJOY

#1 You can see that the retina diet I have been working on has helped their night vision

#2 Radiator cores welded together for a fit check. Silver solder on the inlet / outlet cause its stronger.

#3 Bug's eye view of the radiator area

#4 Core dropped in for a fit check and verification

#5 Core spacing from the lower view area

#6 Free area in front of the 1" thick core is wide as a cell phone for comparison

 

Looks similar to the unit SrtPowa used on his. Check out his gallery

https://www.crossfireforum.org/galle...8/ppuser/16844

 

I think most these heat exchangers with the SC coolant isolated are getting these coolant temps down great, but the reality is the intercooler is just too darn small, and in a terrible location for heatsoak from the engine. Next step should be upgrading that intercooler Waldig =).

 

what size pipe is in those cores? it looks like you can add them without taking the bumper off, correct? you can pick up those transmission cooler radiators for $25-$50 each so it is a cheap mod. I bet it will help a lot, that is on my list of things to try and get done this summer.

 

Looks good! I did this about a month ago and it works great. I also added two 450CFM SPAL fans on a switch. The car pulls strong in 90-100 degree weather even with the increased boost of the 178mm. No more supercharger cutting out like before with the factory system. Only difference is I left the 3/8 hose barbs, so yours mightl flow a little better. I chose to leave it alone, because the Johnson Cm30 is a beast and seems to be moving the liquid fast enough back to my resivour.
I never took pictures of it all finished but there are a couple in my gallery when I was mocking everything up.

 

mine is a 20x10x.75. 1/2" with 3/8"barbs(could be cut and rewelded to 1/2" like Waldig. Purchased from summit racing for around $50. No bumper removal neccesary. Just need to relocate a couple things and remove some plastic pieces.

 

thanks for the info, i need to get off my butt and do mine. Your "icebox" is the same one i used on my last supercharged car, it works great. 1 gallon fuel cell right? that foam is a little hard to pull out but other than that it makes a perfect intercooler tank.

 

I also relocated the horns inside the engine bay using a stainless steel door plate.

 

YES sir, RCI 1 gallon from summit. Yes it was a bit tricky

 

Should change the title to heat exchanger or aftercooler, but i knew what you meant =).

 

Is this IC coolant system tied into the engine coolant system via overflow tank or was that bypassed? Do you have a DIY parts list your might provide? If isolated, is this the same 50/50 antifreeze mix. I was toying with the idea of using a different type of actual heat transfer fluid other than gycol based that might give better heat dissipation. So much is written about the IC Pump and adding bigger HEs, but nobody is talking about the actual fluid in the tubes that is actually doing all the work. What's the total capacity of your system?

 

Well the initial testing has redirected me into a different direction. I had gotten 1/2" pipes and figured to have two cores in series to achieve the greatest temperature drop. HOWEVER, the first thing I did was to measure the flow which was 3.7 Gpm with the Johnson pump on a LET core, now it is 1.3 Gpm. [The 1/4" ends would be way toooo much restriction.]

This low flow is due to the fact that the pipes are not hollow and in fact have "turbulators" or twisted copper fins that break up the flow internally to avoid any laminar flow characteristics. These cause too much flow restriction and Ill drain the coolant probably the 50th time and re-pipe the cores.

The plan now is to feed the coils in the middle, flowing toward both ends which will have 1/4 the restriction overall and 1/2 the fluid flow thru each core; but the same dwell time. The fluid flow is running about 40 to 100 inches of linear motion per second.

I trust that this will cause a measurable increase in the flow over the previous set up, boosting the Gpm to over 4 and reducing the head pressure the pump has to develop. More to follow.

Testing Testing Testing, if you can't measure it how do you know that you are going in a positive direction? I wanna get this right as I feel that this car has more potential if it were not as hot as a Goats butt in a Pepper patch.

Enjoy, Woody
my goal : cool

 

Woody, I was thinking of a coil that was just like your single and not doubling them up. Did you measure flow rate through just one of the coils? I'm curious to see how your new idea of feeding from the middle goes. I would expect that you feed from the pump to a Y or T fitting to go to the two coils. I'm thinking that that would then divide you flow rate through each coil and not help. Maybe a smaller diameter tubing is needed to increase velocity over the longer distance. Keep us posted on your expierements and results.

MikeR

 

Uh this is incorrect, the twisted fins are not turbulators, that reduce laminar flow. yet they do reduce the flow rate.

What they do is, create more surface area so that the heat from the fluid can be dispersed to the main fins more efficiently. infact low flow rate is desired because you want the fluid to be in contact with the cooling fins for as long as possible to remove the heat.

 

I don't have any scientific methods or equipment to measure the flow of my set up, but it seems to be working quite well. As I said, I left the 3/8" hose barbs and the car pulls strong everytime. I agree too much flow can be a bad thing. The only data I have is that my IAT temps were at 109 with an ambient temp of 99. I did this before my brand new laptop crapped out. Still waiting on a replacement so I can do more data logging.

 

Great tech tips and good reading

http://www.stewartcomponents.com/tec...ech_Tips_5.htm
http://www.stewartcomponents.com/tec...ech_Tips_6.htm

grab your calculator and tape measure.....

This is why the the LET designed HE is killer - with the Johnson pump

Lots of cross fins and more pressure...good stuff - lots of great tech tips.

 

Needswings has a cooling product made by DEI, specifically for liquid intercoolers that is supposed to offer superior heat transfer. I need to pick up a bottle when I get a chance. I'm running the green 50/50 stuff.

 

http://www.stewartcomponents.com/tec...ech_Tips_4.htm

This is even stated in the SRT maintenance manual

 

After repiping the cores to make two parallel h/e's I retested the flow to find that the flow was up to 3.1 Gpm due to the lower restriction. This was as anticipated and allows me to go to the next level and reassemble that car to do real world testing.

FYI: THe flow rate of the LET radiator and johnson pump came in at 3.7 GPM.

I also did a test WITHOUT the H/E and ran just the Johnson pump and engine to get a flow rating of 4.0 Gpm for reference. The LET core has many parallel passages for low loss, though it has such redundancy in the layout of the cores that I believe they shadow each other and the overall thickness WITHOUT sufficent air flow contributes to small heat rejection numbers. I was getting below 200 btu's per minute before tearing into all of this.

The two cores are mounted infront of the radiator with about 0.25" spacing and secured without using plastic pins thru the A/C or radiator cores. I could not see doing abuse to the aluminum cores, no way.

My results should be available soon to see if I did or did not find something, being the intrepid hot rodder / ham / RC / and experimenter that I am.
I gotta get this right soon so I can get to the road and do some real driving so I may enjoy the inside of the Crossfire as much as I relish doing testing and mods to the vehicle.

Next summer is already booked for my solar projects as I wanna make a solar turbine using my daily life's blood Freon, that's for another day....

Enjoy, Woody

 

Yippie

It works, I was seeing up to 43 degrees delta where before they were PUSHING 6 degrees. I do another post after the math is done, and I was hopeing for 20 degrees, wow.

Blue storm, sorry they are turbulators, check the word and you will see them. In these cores it looks like they took a smaller pipe and squashed it into a three sided pipe, has an inside and an outside and stuffed it into the pipe, 1/2 " should not have that level of fluid restriction. I looked but did not photo them when I did the install.

Brian had a posting of a web sight that is really good and yes they totally agree the higher the flow rate the better the scrubbing of the boundry layer promoting a better rate of heat transfer.

The stewart post identified the specific heat of the coolant at 0.5 which I will have to account for in my calcs. The deal is that I saw 170++ water out of the intercooler and 130's going in and I did not really get into it. Thats way better, and I figure without the gauge and 12' of hose extra, the water flow is probably over the 3.1 GPM figure, possibly as high as 3.3 GPM.

Enjoy Woody; the cool now.