Intercooler sizes, small turbo

[Jam0r]

I've been looking at replacing the stock intercooler with a more efficient item. The current standard setup is located behind the crash structure and as such only about 50% of the cooler is visible to the front grill.

Intake air temps with normal driving tend to be around 30-35 degrees and that was during the winter months so ambient was no more than 8 degrees outside.

The car has a smallish twin scroll turbo (1.6 engine) and peak torque comes in roughly around 3000-3500 rpm. I'm lead to believe that simply sticking a massive front mounted setup on the car would have a negative effect on power due to the volume of space the turbo would need to fill before hand.

Is there any way to work out what size I would be looking at in order to try and keep the lower down torque but to improve intake temps?

[Jam0r]

Thanks for that reply.

I was a bit cagey with my OP because I didn't want to mention that i've already had a company look at the car and actually design a prototype unit (nobody makes an uprated intercooler for this car yet)

On the dyno the car lost power below 4000rpm but had increased power above (10bhp and 13Nm)

Intake temps on the run with the uprated intercooler were initially around 45+ degrees but that dropped throughout the rev range and ended up around 35 degrees. Ambient was 22 degrees.

The opposite can be said for the stock unit which started at 30 degrees and ended up reading 45 degrees at the end of the rev range. Ambient was 18 degrees.

I was under the impression that the loss of initial power was due to the turbo not being able to fill the larger cooler as quickly as before with the stock unit, hence why it actually made more power at the top end. Would the initial high intake air temps cause the loss in power too?

I've got the dyno graphs if that helps?

Note I haven't actually seen the size of the core yet that had been used.

Edited by Jam0r on Monday 22 June 15:28

Edited by Jam0r on Monday 22 June 15:31

Edited by Jam0r on Monday 22 June 15:35

[Jam0r]

This is the stock intercooler (not my car) and same engine

[Jam0r]

Car is a Ceed GT, no off the shelf options available. There are a few Veloster turbo items from the States but don't fancy importing. Forge do a Veloster turbo setup but that doesn't fit.

http://www.forgemotorsport.co.uk/Front_Mount_Inter...

Dyno from what I gather is an in the floor affair and runs were on different days, same rollers. Not sure how many runs were done but only have the two graphs. Car is non tuned at this moment in time to take advantage of an intake and intercooler, although I have noticed that car pulls much better with the intake fitted. On other cars there are often power increases due to the colder air so I (wrongly) presumed this would be the case here too.

The graphs are as follows, one with standard cooler and one with prototype.

Stock


Prototype

Edited by Jam0r on Monday 22 June 23:00

Edited by Jam0r on Monday 22 June 23:01

Edited by Jam0r on Monday 22 June 23:10

[Jam0r]

The standard run includes the new intake. The stock air box wasn't used at all in those dynos.

So essentially if the intercooler is decent, proper runs would be able to show how effective it is and the ones I already have don't really show anything

Edited by Jam0r on Monday 22 June 23:54

[Jam0r]

I've not paid a penny in all this. I just wanted to see what other people thought on the whole intercooler making a loss thing.

The ECU tuning is something i'll be looking into in the future but didn't want to go down that route until I at least had some bits on the car and the intake and intercooler were the most obvious choices to start with.

I don't really want to go too mental with the whole thing and ideally wanted 'bolt ons' that could be removed come service time.

Edited by Jam0r on Tuesday 23 June 13:16

[Jam0r]

Will monitor them again on the way home, it's fairly warm outside today.

I data logged them earlier this year and with an abiment of less than 8 degrees intake temps were normally around 35-40 degrees.