How does intercooler water spray work

Prev 1 2 3 Next Page 1 of 3. Recommended Posts. Guilt-Toy Posted October 18, Posted October 18, Would spraying too much water onto your intercooler make it heat up the charge air? I have 2 sprayers on the cooler which sprays water controller by a 6psi hobs switch Its a front mount cooler avo stage 2 Any ideas?

Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options Replies 42 Created 17 yr Last Reply 17 yr. Top Posters In This Topic 6 4 5 Can not understand how it could be possible but someone else may want to confirm this. How have you got ur system setup?

Are you using the rear window wiper motor for the ic spray? MM2death Posted October 18, Cheers, Scott. Mik Posted October 18, Hi Mik, you had your kit installed on your wrx correct? Do you have pics of the setup? Cheers, Scott You want the mist to be as fine as possible. This is a simple way of doing it. I still dont think the guys question has been answered. Create an account or sign in to comment You need to be a member in order to leave a comment Create an account Sign up for a new account in our community.

Register a new account. Sign in Already have an account? Because when the car was on boost, the heat was being dumped into the copper-tube-and-water heatsink, and when the car was off-boost, this heat was fed back into the now cooler intake air flow. Of course, if I was climbing a long hill ie on boost for perhaps more than 15 seconds the pump needed to be operating to give the lowest intake air temps.

In a way the point being made in this article is obvious. When you're testing a car's intercooler, it's common to occasionally stop the test and feel the temperature of the core.

If it's hot you know it isn't working very well. And that's because you automatically realise that it is primarily acting as a heatsink! If it was just a radiator, the hotter it was, the better it would exchange heat with the ambient air So, that's a pretty big prelude to the topic of intercooler water sprays, isn't it?

But if you've been following along, you'll see that having a spray that switches on only when the engine's on boost is not very helpful. Because you really want the intercooler core to be cooled before the engine comes on boost, giving a lower temperature heatsink into which more heat can be dumped.

This is exactly the same philosophy that sees some turbo drag cars having their intercooler cores sprayed with nitrous oxide to cool them down before a run.

If the water spray operates only when on boost, the spray operates too late. But there are also other factors to consider. Let's look at a real-life example of intercooler water spray control.

I initially triggered it from the K-Type thermocouple dash digital display the one discussed earlier , so that whenever the intake air temperature exceeded 40 degrees, the spray would operate.

One rapidly empty 12 litre water tank; no discernible change in inlet air temp! The reason that the water tank emptied so fast is that in urban driving, the intake air temp is often high. This is because the small amount of air being drawn into the engine is rapidly heated by the high under-bonnet temperatures.

This meant that in the Skyline's case, the spray was operating even with the car idling in traffic - and the intake air temp did not drop as a result of the spray working. Using a control system consisting solely of an intake air temperature switch simply doesn't work in a road car. Next, I used a boost pressure switch wired in series with the temperature switch, so that there had to be positive manifold pressure ie boost and the intake air temp also had to be over 40 degrees before the spray would operate.

Much reduced water consumption, no measurable change in intake air temp! So, using both intake air temperature and boost inputs didn't work very well. Because by the time the spray started to evaporate and cool the heatsink, the boost event was usually all over!

Let me stress again: on a racetrack, or on the dyno, I'm sure that both approaches would have reduced the intake air temp. The water spray would have been operating very frequently or even continuously - therefore, after the first few throttle applications, the spray would in fact be operating before the next dose of throttle.

But we're talking about the real world here, not artificial tests. And another point to remember about the chassis dyno testing of intercoolers - when compared with the car on the road, the ambient airflow passing through the core is wrong in its characteristics of turbulence, speed, temperature and pressure.

Great test - I don't think! Another real-world problem of intercooler water sprays is that large water tanks are heavy, and also a pain to keep re-filling. So - while water's certainly cheap - a good intercooler water spray system also needs to be as conservative as practically possible in its water use.

This page is for personal, non-commercial use. It also brings back a performance gizmo that hasn't been featured in a U.

As the name implies, it sprays cool water onto the air-to-air intercooler when pressing a button. In the case of the S, that button is one of the paddles on the back of the steering wheel. That triggers the water nozzles hidden in the hood scoop to spray water.

You can see what happens in the video below. Note that when the car is in motion, air would carry the spray farther back covering more of the intercooler. Now why would you want an intercooler sprayer? Well, the S, like all WRX and STI models, uses an air-to-air intercooler to cool off hot air coming from the turbocharger on its way to the intake manifold. The cooler your air, the denser it is, meaning more oxygen to combine with fuel to turn into more power.

The effectiveness of the intercooler depends partly on the temperature of the outside air flowing over the intercooler.

If it's really hot out, it's not as effective. So spraying water onto the intercooler can counter this to ensure that the car is making maximum horsepower even in toasty conditions. This also means that although this may feel like some special secret performance-boosting weapon, it's really only effective in specific circumstances, and will just get you back to normal power, rather than make the car noticeably faster on the street.

This is called heat soak, and can be frustrating and cause engine over heating. Adding intercooler sprayers can be a very cheap and cost effective way of adding just a little more performance to your car or truck and solving some overheating problems at the same time.

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Dynamic Compression Air to Air Vs. Special thanks to:. Info from every other site I looked at, only said how to do it using costly special tools. Thank you for showing the REAL easy way, and saving me some money. So much mis-information on forums, good to read some solid info. For the latest Automotive news and stories visit the websites below. Engine Basics. EFI Tuning. Chassis Tuning. Intercoolers Intercoolers are a great way to cool our intake air after a supercharger or turbocharger has compressed it.

Intercooler Sprayer Intercoolers like most automotive parts, have an efficiency associated with them. A Cheap Way to set-up an intercooler sprayer Believe it or not one of the best ways to set-up a cheap intercooler sprayer is to tap into windshield washer hose. Do I just spray Water?