Has anyone done it? Divert the A/C lines to the intercooler which has an incorporated A/C evaporator. Would have Air at 40 degrees or less all the time.

 

You would not have 40° air at the volume and inlet temps that would occur at WOT. You might be able to achieve those intake temps at idle, but once you start moving any real air over the evaporator, that would be over. By the time you got through a couple of gears, I'm betting your intake temps would be only reduced by a couple of degrees and the evaporator would be nothing but an airflow restriction at that point.

That's why we use meth.

 

Ford was tinkering with this on their lightning prototype - from what i recall, there was a seperate airbox that they cooled the air in, and they somehow diverted the chilled air into the intake tract for what they claimed to be "about 1/4 mile" worth of cold air :p

 

Funny, a friend of mine (with a Lightning) and I were wondering the same thing.

We were thinking of submersing the evaporator into the reservoir for the intercooler. Use it to cool the intercooler water, not the air charge directly.

The thought was to eliminate the heat soak, or at least significantly extend to time before heat soak became a measurable issue.

We never got enough ambition to follow it through.

 

The problem with roots and screw type blowers is that they don't benefit from meth like other F/I methods do. Meth needs to be sprayed after the air is compressed and the spray bar is difficult to make small enough jets and atomize the liquid in such a short distance before the intake charge reaches the cylinder. What roots and screw types do love, however is nitrous! And how!

For the Lightning, for drag racing, you may consider a couple of things. Nitrous! and second, a methanol and water spray bar on the heat exchanger up front and maybe diverting the water from the reservoir to a larger one in the back that's full of ice water. You could put valves in the lines and divert the water to the rear unit and fill it up with ice.

 

the best way to ensure you dont have to worry about heat soak on a supercharger is fit a large enough heat exchange! If you think about how big an a2a intercooler you need to cool 1000bhp worth of air then why would a stupid little little heat exchange be able to remove that much heat? answer is they cant and thats why you get heat soak. yes the bigger the res the longer it takes to heat the water up.

compressing air creats heat. you can run a HUGE chargecooler to remove the heat but you will actually need a BIGGER heat exchange to remove the heat from the water. the one advantage is, unlike an A2A cooler, you are cooling the water back down to ambient all the time. As said before, if you hadd a heat exchange the size of an A2A then you 'should' be able to keep water temps at about ambient pretty well! however some would argue 'why not just fit an A2A?'.

what other options doyou have? well there is chemical intercooling, ie meth or water injection. these work well but you have a limited amount. and theyboth do slightly diffrent things. Meth actualy cools the intake air, and adds a little octane to the mix.water basically slows the flame fornt down inside the cylinders and thus enables your engine to take higher intake temps.

As Blown said above you could spray water onto the heat exchange. again this works ok(rally guys use this) but its a limited to the size of the tank.

N2O, cooling and power, but will only last a very short period of time!

Tuning. you may think SOD IT and hjust tune the engine to take higher intake temps.

you could also maybe look to run lower boost presure. this should result in lower intake temps. obviously this would efect power, so you are going to need to build the engine more . Maybe a little more compression, better flowing heads, better flow exhaust, super flowing intake manifold, efficent camshaft. etc, etc....

Just my ideas.

Chris.