Can't see it myself. It'd make more sense to refrigerate your turbo and intercooler lines, or vent your bonnet and blow cold air on them, with the added benefit of reducing underboonet temps, else why would you bother sticking all the output air through an intercooler, far less upgrading the stock TMIC with a better TMIC or FMIC?
And why lag all your intercooler lines to keep them nice and warm when you expect the cooler itself to drop the temperature of the red hot air from the moment it transitions from the turbo outlet line into the cooler core, just before you feed it into the engine? Why not start to cool it as soon as it leaves the turbo? Even consider putting cooling fins on your turbo outlet lines, maybe, as long as they lost more heat than they gained.
Heat might indeed be energy, but in this case it is largely a product of the proximity of the compressor to red hot exhaust gases rather than just compression of the inducted air. The sooner and the more you cool that air, the better your volumetric efficiency and that starts in the plumbing, not just at the cylinders. The less space that air takes up, the more you can get into the plumbing.
If you use this logic of keeping turbo discharge air hot, you might as well say that cars run better on hot days than cold nights, which of course they don't, for reasons of lower air density and thus lower volumetric efficiency.
Last edited by Doug_MPS6; 19-08-2010 at 10:10 PM.
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