Quote:
Originally Posted by Joshinator99
Negative my friend! TURBULENCE is the word of the day. So you need enough flow to keep water temperature effective across the supercharger brick (too slow of a flow rate means the water heats up too much in the supercharger brick and makes it less effective in cooling the charge…(ie 150 degree water does a worse job cooling the air than 100 degree water), enough turbulence to make sure the water is scrubbed across the heat exchanger for max heat transfer, and flow that is slow enough to allow for the actual heat transfer (allowing you to dump heat out of the water using your heat exchangers). It’s definitely a balancing act.
In other words, you’re balancing this flow rate so that you keep a reasonable temperature differential across the supercharger brick, say 10-20 degrees…and then you have adequate flow and heat exchanger surface area to scrub that 10-20 degrees out the other end. If you pump too fast the differential shrinks too much (maybe only 5 degrees) so now you’re not absorbing or rejecting enough BTUs. If you pump too slow, the differential jumps up to maybe 40 or more degrees so now you have brick temps that aren’t useful… 150 degree water is pretty useless since heat transfer is directly dependent and proportional to temperature difference! So if your supercharger is spitting out 200 degree air, then 100 degree water will pull heat from the air charge faster than 150 degree water will…that’s a point that seems obvious though. 
Hope that helps! But measuring flow and temperatures before & after the brick (and heat exchanger if possible) can help you understand a lot about what’s up. I am lazy though and just upgrade everything to the biggest/best I can find and then look at final results haha |
Great feedback Josh, that makes sense... I understand turbulence would be a negative effect, I was just saying that I dint not think laminar flow was necessarily a bad thing. Love your lazy comment BTW. Sounds like it's working so far!
A few things that I have found with my system, is that the extra volume helps alot. Granted I am a roll race guy, it's cool watching the HX coolant temps at the end of a 40-150 pull put a 60F difference between the incoming coolant and outgoing coolant, but because that 120-130F water instantly mixes with 2 gallons in the fender tank, before going through 3 HX, it very hard to actually raise the inlet HX coolant temps on the street.
Talking with RAVI from CSF today, he couldn't believe we have unlocked a 50% increase in flow by removing the main restrictions. About the pump, it was his opinion that the CWA150 pump should be a benefit. Although it's relative to vehicle speed, his guess was that the sweet spot would be closer to 7GPM, but would need to test. I haven't looked into it yet, but I need to see if HPT and control the PWM on the CWA150. Ravi was explaining that the new BMW's use variable pressure HX pumps, because you want a slower flow rate at lower speeds, and a higher flow rate at higher speeds. He didnt know the flow rate but I guess Nascar runs at 40psi + for the cooling systems based on the higher speeds, where as the OEM pump on my set up sees around 13.5psi on the cold side and 19psi on the hot side...