JDWalton

It has to do with thermal loads. The amount of energy it would take to cool a hot intake enough to make a difference would require a significant amount of cooling. Like those add on Ac's that you see on top of a van thats been converted to carry passengers. The thing is huge, takes a lot of energy, creates tons of drag, and just would not be practical on a sports car.

I'm on come overclocking forums and every couple of months see a similar thread.

"Hey, I had this great idea no one has thought of before, instead of investing in all these fancy fans and water-cooling, I'm gonna stick my PC in a freezer."

The usual response is, "Go ahead if you want to find out how to turn a freezer into an oven."

To put it simply, think about how much heat your motor is transferring into your intake. To get significantly cooler, you need to be able to cool significantly more heat then your engine can transfer too it. Its just too big a transfer of energy to realistically do.

siggyfreud

Where is the power for the electric motor coming from? Your alternator. In order for your alternator to provide that type of power, you'll need either a much larger one, or another one. In either case, you're adding drag back to the motor which will more than negate the savings you'll gain from cooling your intake charge.

Think about what your talking about on a fundamental level. You want to introduce something into your system that will give you more power. However, that 'something' doesn't run off of a consumable energy source (methanol, gasoline, etc). Instead, it runs off an energy source that your motor generates, whether its from spinning a pulley, or drawing from an energy source created by another spinning pulley. You're doing this and asking it to give you more power than what you're putting in. This, as far as we know, is fundamentally impossible without using some type of consumable power. If it wasn't, we could just use electricity to drive an electric motor that puts out more power than it takes to run.

Simplified, you want to put 15hp into running a machine, but you're asking it to output 25hp. Until we perfect fusion, it probably isn't going to happen .

onederful100

instead of rigging the AC, it would be cheaper and easier to fab a air/air IC.
friend of mine bought a used tuner kit (vortech) and added his own air/air IC using various piping.
works fine. and it was cheap.


what kind of FI is this for?

JIM5.0

Even with an AC used as an intercooler, if you do the energy calculations, you will see that the laws of thermodynamics are preserved.

For using an AC as an intercooler, there is more than just figuring out how much energy is used versus how much energy is created. The third factor to considered is how much energy is wasted. And efficiency is used to express that: how much useful output is gained given how much energy you burned to create it.
Since energy cannot be created, only changed, if you add up the amount of energy burned, the amount of useful energy created, and teh amount of energy wasted, you will see that the total energy is never increased of decreased (i.e. energy is not created from nothing nor are you making energy disappear into nothing).

Now, why have not ACs been adapted to pump out waste heat from a compressor? I am sure that engineers and other designers have actually sat down and done the energy calculations and realized that more waste energy is being created while you burn more energy and get less useful energy out of the process.
Does it mean that ACs will never be used as an intercooling device? No, that is not a guaranty either. There just might be a refrigerant that has the right properties to take tremendous amounts of heat energy to pump it out of the system (i.e. the intake charge). But we have yet to see that refrigerant made practical for cars. It could be too expensive as of yet, or very simply, it does not exist yet (some inventor will have to either create it or discover it).

Simon1

It's called the "Killer Chiller."

Look it up.

Reduces IAT 20-40 degrees.

siggyfreud

Know anyone who has used it? I just don't see it working that well. I suppose you might gain a few ponies because some of the inefficiency will present itself in heat that the unit has to then vent whether it's under the hood or somewhere else, but again you're still trading energy around. Now if you're utilizing the existing A/C you're already spinning, then I guess there could be some merit? But once again you're just trading power around.

bigblue95z

No way this could ever work. You'd have to have a massive evaporator and equally large condenser to get the hotgas back into liquid form. And, a compressor that can handle that kind of head pressure and temperature from all the refrigerant being flashed. Think of it this way, your car has about 90 cubic feet of interior space and how long does it take to get it down to a comfortable temp from say 95*, let alone say a drop of 30* in the cabin. Now, you'd have to have a system capable doing the same thing for approx 17x the size of your cabin, EVERY MINUTE. Once you flash off that refrigerant the first time, it's going to be coming back still a gas and will have absolutely 0 cooling effect.

I've got a 250HP refrigeration system at work that runs 4 evaporators (each the size of our cars) and a condenser 2x the size (with a 1000cfm water cooling system to assist) to cool a blast freezer to -35*. When I fire it off it takes about 45min to cool a room approx 15000 cfm to 30* above from 75*. Food for thought.

Entrenched

http://www.killerchiller.com/

this is what i've got, block off heat exchanger, intercooler temps hover in the 40* range.

stealth_GT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=askw2...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Ql84-iz6I

very interesting..

JDWalton

lol, its nice but the kit is like $750 at lethal..... Seriously it a heat exchanger in a box. You can probably make your own for $200. Less if you get creative and go to a scrap yard.

Metal box
oil cooler
AC Recharge kit
some tubing
some fittings from Home Depot.

Having looked at it more, its very similar to what we do with computer overclocking when we re-purpose a home AC as a processor cooler. Only thats more difficult cause you have to be able to machine a cooling block to fit the processor. This is made with parts that are readily available. Not saying everyone can do it, but its not that hard with a little research.