ic question

heres a question, my take on bigger intercollers is so that we are able to cool the air more efficently than stock, right??? what if we were to install a fan on the stock ic wouldnt that have the same effect and cost a hell of alot less??? patent pending :smokin:

a fan would help to keep it from heatsoaking. the only problem would be that the stock ic has 2.5 inlet/outlet pipes so its a restriction when you go to the bigger turbos. a fan will help with the cooling but not with the flow

It's not going to make a big difference at all. I could elaborate for paragraphs, but the jist of it is this; The idea of a bigger intercooler, is to not only increase the effiency of it, but also increase the surface area inside the intercooler to which does the cooling. Thus, it can cool more air at one time. When you overrun this, your friend heat soak shows up. Mayve after a run or something and your just sitting their idleling, but other then that, I couldn't see this working to well. There is a lot more too this, what I said was sort of vague, but good enough.

That fan cannot outflow the amount of air that is passing through it when you are at highway speed.(depending on location and such) I am sure you have seen dyno's being performed on a car that has a fmic. They always have fans being put on them, and even if the fan is pushing air at ~70mph towards the intercooler, it cannot compare the volume of air that is being passed through it when the car is going down the highway. In short, unfortunately your idea has been thought of, and won't work enough so to make your effort worth it. Sorry to say.

I might still try this though. The stock 2g intercoolers are actually pretty good. The problem with any IC in that lcoation though is ambient airflow. There is a high pressure area in front of the tire, so it is commonly believed that there will be very little airflow across the core. So it is basically reduced to a small heatsink rather than an intercooler. A fan, if it moves enough air, could take care of the airflow issue.

Now, that doesnt change the fact that anything over a 16g is going to flow more than I would want to pass through a stock IC, so you will still have to upgrade if you go with a larger turbo. Otherwise, I Would try this and try to collect some data to validate the theory, or prove it useless. A differential temperature guage would do the trick, not sure what they cost. 30 bucks maybe? Or 2 5 dollar radio shack temp sensors would work. The fans arent cheap, one that size might be a little cheaper though, 50 bucks perhaps.

I Was going to try this along with some shrouding to expose the rear face of the core to the airstream running under the car, which should be a low presssure area, rather than the tire. High pressure in front of the IC (of course), and low pressure behind the IC, euqals pressure differential, which means the ability to do work, in this case, move air. Aaron is right on some points, but I still think its worth testing :)

What about a pull-type fan behind the stock sidemount? That seems like it'd help draw more air directly through the core.

oh well... at least im thinking. thx guys

Just saw a 7 inch fan in the summit catalog, 65 bucks or so. Its a good chunk of change if it doesnt help, but it certainly wont hurt. Well thought out, well contructed shrouding might be more cost effective, but requries a bit of knowledge about how air moves and sheetmetal work. But its cheap enough to try out with some cheap flashing from homedepot. For 5 bucks, if it doesnt work, who cares. I did some of this with the SUpra IC the night before the 2002 Shootout. It fell off somewhere in cleveland :D But who cares, it was cheap. Well, a little more, since I used aluminum.