Oil cooler Idea

KERMIT

The 2012+ cars have the factory oil cooler, however it is not adequate for spirited driving. Because it is tied to the engine coolant.

Switiching to an oil to air unit brings significant risk of oil loss

Since heat transfer relies on delta temperature, why not make the factory cooler run on its own separate water loop? If the water entering the cooler is near ambient, the factory cooler should work just fine.

It would need a small pump and a air to water radiator out front.

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Chuck33079

You still have a very small area for the water to take heat out of the oil. Have you taken a look at it? The unit is tiny.

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Jordo!

Whatever became of the laminova core idea?

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DEpointfive0

and it's MUCH easier and probably cheaper at the end of the day to get a real oil cooler, even a modshack one

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Felix 808

For it to be effective, you need surface area & dwell time ( exposure to cooling effect) Simply exposing the oil filter area to cool water will not suffice.

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KERMIT

I understand thermodynamics... It was just a cheap way to bump up the heat transfer while maintaining reliability.

If we put some thermocouples in the stock system we could calculate how much effect dropping the water temp would have.

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Jordo!

Part of the problem is: Cooler is not always better (as it is with air, ingested by a motor).

The goal is to maintain the same target temp across a range of circumstances. That's tricky it seems...

All things being equal, my (limited) knowledge on the subject points me to 180* - 200* being ideal, and all other temps less desirable.

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KERMIT

Ok... So we add a thermostatic motor control switch, or maybe a PID controller

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Jordo!

Absolutely.

For a road (i.e., not track dedicated) car that tends to see temps higher than 220* in normal driving, it sounds like the smaller core plus thermostatic plate = win.

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wstar

I think Travisjb is (or was?) running such a setup. Last I heard, the Laminova was definitely exchanging enough heat to keep oil temps in line with water temps (which is perfect), but on the first test he had issues with water overheating and needed more water cooling to make the setup work (bigger radiator, better fans/shroud, etc?). With the Laminova route you're still going to have a sandwich adapter and some risk of blowing an oil line, but you could mount it fairly close to keep the lines short (inside the bay, perhaps on the horizontal bar near the bottom of the radiator). The upside is it's probably superior oil cooling for less weight, and the engine oil would warm up significantly faster on a cold day and stay more stable on e.g. highway trips.

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Infidel

Back in the day I thought aluminum heads were the $%*# but if they aren't at optimum temp the fuel won't burn like it should. Thank God (my heads) they were a great design and are worth a ton of money to this day.

KERMIT

So in summary, the theory is sound. A cheap and reliable way to reduce oil temperatures. The question is how much heat rejection it can enable by dropping the coolant temp from engine coolant temp to near ambient temp.

Concerns are about too much or too little heat rejection. Which can be handled by a simple controller of the auxiliary pump.

If the heat rejection rate is raised significantly, it could be used on a track car..

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wstar

IMHO, it sounds too complicated to do one-off engineering like that for a track car (separate coolant path + PID controller and some kind of flow-switching, etc) and expect the parts and setup to be reliable. The best-known oil cooling solution that works reliably is to do a really good job (using quality hoses/parts!) setting up a 25- or 34- row Setrab cooler out in front of the radiator and skip the 2013 oil/water exchanger. If you want to take on a little first-time-installer engineering risk, I'd spend that on testing a Laminova setup + upsized radiator and getting those sized right for the car. You won't need fancy temp controllers. Given a sufficiently-large Laminova core, the oil temps will approximate the water temps (both on warmup and during track driving, presumably), and water temps will be stable unless the car overheats (get a bigger radiator and/or better fans/shrouding). With the right parts there you should see very stable oil+water temps somewhere in the ballpark of 202-230 depending on conditions, which is about as good as it gets.

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Jordo!

True -- even in air and fuel, too cold isn't ideal (although the distribution of ideals temps skews towards the cold side of things, especially in forced induction situations where tons of extra heat are introduced into the equation).

I just try and offer my 2 cents on the oil because I am fairly certain not everyone springing for a cooler realizes that ideal oil and water temps turn out to be close in magnitude, as another poster had sagely noted. Seems like a lotta guys spring for big air coolers and then rarely see optimal oil temps, which winds up being counter productive, especially considering modern synthetic oils are engineered to function well even at hotter temps.

There's a good chapter on this topic in the Bell text on forced induction and tuning, BTW.

Oh yeah -- arguably a closed loop system, independently regulated but approximately in line with water temps, would be ideal, I just don't know of anyone running one. It would be an interesting project to be sure.

You'd need something like a nice Johnson water pump, a dedicated heat exchanger core (single pass is probably more than enough) and a thermostat. Not sure how much the optimal oiling would offset the weight gain from the extra parts, but an interesting project to take on.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint (and trusting in Nissan's R&D), probably so long as you are below 260*ish F you are fine in terms of safe oiling under high load, although closer to 200* F +/- 20* F is probably about ideal, especially given the sheering resistance of most modern synthetic oils. Even at 260* F or higher, catastrophic engine failure is unlikely, although you may start losing power much over 200* F (and I know that, anecdotally, at least, that the ECU pulls a bit of timing over that).

I took the easy route, and added a bunch of ARC "cool fins" to the exterior of my oil pan; adding some extra metal is a quick and dirty solution to this problem, at least for road cars. I never see temps over about 205* in normal FL summer driving, and very rarely over 215* beating on it in the 90*+ heat.

Behold:



I also have two stuck on my diff cover

That's still not a "track ready" setup, methinks, but a surprisingly good and inexpensive solution for a DD.

Successfully implemented on the two Z34's I've owned, so probably not a fluke.

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wstar

FWIW, the basic setup and stats on mine now (this is on a car that's almost exclusively track duty now, other than driving to/from events until I pick up a trailer and all that):

Oil cooler setup: Setrab Series-9 (the widest) 25-row, mounted to the lower edge of the radiator core support like usual, and then also has a thin aluminum plate mounting the top edge to the crash bumper beam. This is partly to stabilize it against g-force and vibration, but also it blocks the path of air "over the top" of the oil cooler, forcing more air through it. It's on the passenger side and connected via quality AN fittings and steel-braided hoses (originally from the Stillen kit), and uses a Mocal 180F thermostatic sandwich plate adapter. I'm also running the longer-than-stock oil filter size and that fits fine on top (e.g. K&N HP-1010), to help with flow rate and whatnot.

Semi-related, on the driver's side is a Series-6 19-row Setrab that's cooling my 7AT trans fluid, without a top-mount to the crash beam. Between the two Setrabs, they're blocking/consuming the vast majority of the incoming clean air, with only a small hole between them and a little flow over the top of the trans cooler.

Radiator: CSF, without the bolt-on condenser unit. The trans fluid is also using the built-in trans fluid cooler in the radiator. Stock fans and shroud, but UpRev is setup to run them full blast at any MPH once coolant is up to solid temps, to help suck air through the Setrab->CSF stack even at speed and keeping things flowing in the right directions.

Coolant mix: about 90% distilled water with just a little normal coolant mixed in for easy smell/taste test and color, and probably a little corrosion protection. A bottle of MoCool or WaterWetter is in there too (whatever I have/order when I do a fluid change).

I went through a couple of track events this year in pretty unbelievable Texas summer heat, and even on the worst runs of the weekend (hottest ambient temps, car's got some latent heat from previous runs, pushing hard, etc) I get coolant stable around 215-222-ish and oil temps mostly stabilize around 220, sometimes pushing up towards 225 at the peak of things.

The main problem I have with my cooling system now is something's wrong with my aftermarket radiator cap and/or the stock 2009-2011 coolant overflow tank system, etc, which results in a pair of problems: seepage from the coolant tank's stupid screw-on cap under high lateral g-force in sweepers, and lack of vacuum return from the overflow bottle back to the main cooling system as the car cools down (so after a couple runs I have to cool off the system a bit and manually feed the bottle back into the radiator to make up lost fluid volume). These are relatively trivial issues though, and my intended fix is to upgrade to the 2012/2013-style pressurized bottle system (have the parts, still working out details of adapting to 2009).

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