Been mulling over the IC options again, and although its 99% likely I'll just stick a 9000 IC, I did come up with this as an idea and thought about running it through here to see if anyone thinks its a goer...
When I did the 9000 IC conversion on a friend's 900, we junked all the air conditioning gubbins, but its just occured to me - "what about using it to make a charge-cooler".
The air con has a large rad which fits perfectly into the gap before the coolant rad and there are gaps already there to take the plumbing. I could forget about the heater-matrix bits of the air-con and just take the pump and radiator, but instead of pumping into a matrix, make up a 'box' to fit around the existing IC and pump the cooled water through the box, thus making a charge-cooler.
Except it would be even better than a standard charge cooler becuase the coolant was being actively refrigerated.
It's a far neater solution in terms of packaging than a 9K IC, but would it actually be any good? Would the additional parasitic loss from the AC pump outweigh the benefit (bearing in mind that the current IC is only marginally better than useless)? Would the AC pump be large enough to cope at all?
If the losses from the pump would outweigh the cooling benefits, then here's a second thought - The air-con pump is actually two pumps, isn't it (coz that's how a refridgerator works). I'm guessing the majority of the power drain is the pump fighting against the pressure gradient to acheive the cooling effect. Maybe if you modified the AC pump to allow the pressure to equalise across the two halves (in effect turning it into a pure pump), then it would draw far less power. I'm not sure what the AC pump actually flows (but it would flow a lot more without the resistance of driving the compressor too).
Although you would then lose the added refridgeration benefits of using the AC compressor, you'd still have a chargecooler with a massive front rad, without having to the the body surgery necessary for the 9k IC.
Thoughts?
When I did the 9000 IC conversion on a friend's 900, we junked all the air conditioning gubbins, but its just occured to me - "what about using it to make a charge-cooler".
The air con has a large rad which fits perfectly into the gap before the coolant rad and there are gaps already there to take the plumbing. I could forget about the heater-matrix bits of the air-con and just take the pump and radiator, but instead of pumping into a matrix, make up a 'box' to fit around the existing IC and pump the cooled water through the box, thus making a charge-cooler.
Except it would be even better than a standard charge cooler becuase the coolant was being actively refrigerated.
It's a far neater solution in terms of packaging than a 9K IC, but would it actually be any good? Would the additional parasitic loss from the AC pump outweigh the benefit (bearing in mind that the current IC is only marginally better than useless)? Would the AC pump be large enough to cope at all?
If the losses from the pump would outweigh the cooling benefits, then here's a second thought - The air-con pump is actually two pumps, isn't it (coz that's how a refridgerator works). I'm guessing the majority of the power drain is the pump fighting against the pressure gradient to acheive the cooling effect. Maybe if you modified the AC pump to allow the pressure to equalise across the two halves (in effect turning it into a pure pump), then it would draw far less power. I'm not sure what the AC pump actually flows (but it would flow a lot more without the resistance of driving the compressor too).
Although you would then lose the added refridgeration benefits of using the AC compressor, you'd still have a chargecooler with a massive front rad, without having to the the body surgery necessary for the 9k IC.
Thoughts?
