Intercooler flow direction with Ice?
 

Was thinking of replacing the MP112 intercooler reservoir for a bigger battery tray unit that can be filled with ice for the track(battery is now in trunk). Looking at the magnuson intercooler flow, it only makes sense that the plumbing would have to be changed around/reversed. As it is right now the reservoir pumps to the heat exhanger and then to the intercooler, where if there was ice in the system you would want to go straight from reservoir to the intercooler then to the heat exchanger. Anyone played arounf with this before?

The first picture shows how the flow goes on the Heartbeat system when the lines are routed the way Magnuson shows in the instructions.
Note that there is no continual flow through the reservoir tank. The tank just keeps the coolant topped-off in the system.

https://i.imgur.com/GpllPRe.jpg



The picture below is how the lines would need to be routed so you would have continual flow through the reservoir.
This way, the tank reservoir would not just be a 'holding tank'.

https://i.imgur.com/pFC5YHI.jpg

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.cor...16f23839cd.png
for apples to apples, I've added the MP112 cooling circuit diagram
thanks for your input, although neither of those make sense to me when using ice. I'm no engineer, but if you have a reservoir with ice/water you want that going direct into the intercooler. Sending the ice water through the pump, through the exchanger and then to the intercooler makes no sense. The heat exchanger is only cooling if the ambient air temperature flowing across the core is cooler than the fluid running through it. So in this case if you have let's say 40 degree water flowing through the exchanger and ambient air is 70 degrees, you're effectively warming your water before using the water to extract heat from the boost air flowing through the intercooler core. So I assume there would be 2 options, option 1 being if you have to keep flow direction the same then you need to relocate/replumb the reservoir to be between the exchanger core and intercooler cores, or option 2 reverse the flow of the system altogether. please feel free to correct me where I'm wrong.

The best way to route the I/C lines with an ice tank is: Tank(lower bung)>Pump>Intercooler>H/X>Tank(return/upper bung). Please note that you cannot pressurize the tank as some may suggest in order to push coolant through the I/C core directly from the tank. That will not work, because the tank would have to be completely full and pressurized and your IC pump probably won’t work pushing that much hard pressure.
There is a caveat to using a small ice tank though, which I’ve learned from personal experience, which is that this is only the more efficient way as long as the coolant in the tank isn’t above ambient temps. Once it reaches that point, then the system is unable to “recover” as quickly from higher IATs after a pass, simply because the cooling effect of the H/X on coolant temps is adversely affected (for a short period of time) by the fact that the coolant from the H/X is being dumped back into a tank of now heated coolant. After a couple of minutes you will see it recover though, as the coolant temp in the tank drops.
The other thing I’ve learned is that is does not take very long for the coolant in a 1 gallon ice/water reservoir to heat up. By way of example, if I start out from the pits with chilled water (I’ll explain this in a bit) in the tank and a IAT of say ~70*, by the time I make it through the the staging lanes and do a burnout, my IATs are already at about 100* (@ 90* ambient) and climbs to around 130-140* during a 1/8 mile pass. I’ve also noted from datalogging that the cooling effect of the H/X is also blunted during a 1/8 mile run as well, simply because the coolant that’s being cooled by the massive rush of air through the H/X core is being dumped into the tank and so has a minimal cooling effect. As a consequence, the cooling effect of the H/X never makes it to the CACs (“intercooler”) during a pass, so the H/X serves me no purpose during a run.
So, if you are going to use an ice tank for track use (which is the only reason you would use one, right?) it needs to have a larger capacity than the typical battery tray version, IMV, and/or the coolant temps need to be very low at the start of a run. Also, if you are using the typical coolant reservoir (like the Moroso one I have) you can put ice in it, but there’s a potentially dangerous problem: As the ice melts, it will become small enough to be sucked into the inlet orifice, possibly all the way to the pump, which could possibly destroy the pump. I only realized this when I was using some plastic “fake ice” I bought at Target (which I thought was the greatest thing since sliced bread) and luckily I spotted in the staging lanes that my IATs were climbing, realized what had happened and jumped out and pulled the plastic ice pack out of the inlet, which had sucked one of the melted “ice cubes” into the inlet and blocked it completely. This was the first and last time I used “ice” in the tank. I hate to think where my IATs would’ve gone on that run.
So, I have not yet personally used ice in the tank on a run to see how well that works. What I do is keep a couple of gallons of distilled water in an ice chest and keep swapping out the coolant in the tank between passes. But that only has a minimal effect, if anything, over the stock setup. I intend to fix that problem by creating a “strainer” of some sort over the inlet to prevent anything bigger than say 1/4” from passing through, so that I can fill the tank with distilled water ice cubes. I just haven’t gotten around to that yet.
Apologies for the long post, but wanted to share my experience so that you may avoid some of these issues.

Here’s a few pictures of my tank, as well as a roughly sketched diagram of how I have my H/X hoses routed.
i used some of the adhesive radiant heat barrier to insulate the tank, as well as using insulation over the hose from the tank to pump, which unfortunately runs close to the right side header.
Please note also that if you’re using the Moroso unit like this one, it is slightly longer than the C6 battery tray, which I fixed by cutting the raised lip off one side of the tray, so that the tank could sit flat in the tray.
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.cor...5732f20b8.jpeg
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.cor...9fda5ea3b.jpeg
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.cor...749f1cd21.jpeg
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.cor...209f4842c.jpeg

And withthe above the pump always has a decent head pressure! Not a massive issues aftermarket but there have been a lot of C7 Z06 threads about Pump cavitation (the Z06 pump then shuts down).

The flow path needs to be:

Coolant tank > Pump > intercooler brick > HX > Coolant tank then it restarts