Neil,
modern cars that use water/oil coolers do so for a couple of reasons I
believe. 1 As you mention the ability to keep the oil cooler out of the air
flow. 2. Packaging (everything has to be somewhere) You can stick the oil
cooler next to the oil filter or next to the sump as long as you pump water
to it. 3. Cost water hoses cost less than high pressure oil hoses. Do not
underestimate the importance of this in building cars. If you save $1 a car
and build a million of them you've made a million bucks.
To use a water/oil cooler fed by the rad water you would have to plumb the
thing in (not too hard) BUT you would have to have excess cooling capacity in
the existing cooling system otherwise all you are going to do is overheat the
radiator.
If you use separate water, you will have to build a separate container and
radiator otherwise no cooling once the water boils away. So the question
becomes where would you put the extra radiator, water pump and all that stuff?
As a side note land speed record cars (Bonniville) use water cooled
intercoolers for their turbos. They have a box that contains a large
intercooler, the box is fed with two LARGE pipes, and a BIG pump that go to
an ice chest (in my friends car located in the hatch area) When starting a
run the ice chest is full of ice and a little water. Five miles later (end
of the run) the ice is all melted and the water is between 70-80 F. My
friend says that this arrangement cools the intake air from 400F to 68F
Rick
In a message dated 03/11/2000 9:40:47 PM Pacific Standard Time,
neilc@apphosting.com writes:
> Water being recirculated via the cooling system runs at 160-200+F, obviously
> this isn't cooler than the outside air, so how is the cooling improved? ie
> the Air would be at worst 105F. Would it be better to set up a different
> feed from an altogether seperate resevoir? Problem is the water would be
> sitting and not circulating through the cooler. This is interesting to me
as
> I was intending on fitting a cooler to the A, here in Australia it gets
very
> hot, but in traffic I would doubt that the cooler would make a major
> difference, so hence my interest in the water/oil cooler.
>
> Apparently a lot of modern cars run these types of coolers such as the
> Miata/MX5. Comments anyone? :)
>
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