RE: Home made intercooler

[Randy McCall <randym@schiller.com>]

If you want to cool the air stream in a big way, and you want to make your 
own IC, I would suggest some sort of indirect evaporative cooling approach 
for a single pass IC.  Something as simple as a fine mist controlled and 
optimized for expected IC surface temperatures can reduce the dreaded heat 
soak and fool your turbo into thinking it's a cool day.  Another approach 
that may work just as well, but will not address static pressure losses in 
a two pass IC is to direct inject atomized water in the air stream and use 
the stock IC. I have been working on some energy projects with emerging 
technologies and evaporative cooling has worked very well for the HVAC 
applications, both pre-cooling of make-up air, as well as indirect cooling 
of return or outside air.

For really humid areas, you may not be able to add much moisture unless the 
intake air temp was much higher than ambient (as temp goes up, air holds 
more water before saturation, resulting in room for additional evaporation 
and thus heat of vaporization gains).  For real tech-heads, there are 
plenty of temperature, humidity, and flow sensors to address water 
injection in combustion air streams (one refinery project with direct water 
injection is slated to save on the order of several million kWh - roughly 
+25% on high T days - just due to cooler combustion inlet air).

Anyway, with really tight quarters of the Type 44 cars, indirect cooling of 
the IC for those really hot times could be just what you are looking for. 
 Give it a thought...

-Randy
'90 200Q in cool coastal climate