Ambient Temperature Research with Force Induction

Originally Posted by 1slow370

Excuse my ignorance here but what does the turbine housing have to do with Intake air temperature, maybe the compressor housing sure i could see some effect there, but that wouldn't make much sense to me either because one would think that so long as the chosen turbo runs through it's best path through the adiabatic efficiency islands when mapped to the flow of the motor, considering that adiabatic efficiency is the percentage of wasted energy due to the act of compressing a gas compared to the ideal amount of energy it takes to compress that gas if you are traveling through the 73% island that means that 27% of the turbo's energy is being converted into friction and heat instead of pumping air so basically what i'm trying to say there is to my understanding it doesn't so much matter what the flow of the housing is so long is the turbo is correctly mapped for the application you will see the lowest possible resulting iat's from the turbo. The next question i would have regarding this is that i would agree with you in that the intercooler size does not particularly matter so long as it is more efficient than any intercooler known at shedding heat, being that we are stuck with aluminum i would say that a larger intercooler is always a better thing because even if your turbo(of course matched to the motor) was belting out charge temps near 500 degrees(i dunno like a pro turbo drag car) if your intercooler has enough surface area and an appropriate temperature delta from the cooling media (be it air in cosmo's case or a very large chest of salty-icewater in the case of our dragster)than it would be entirely possible to reduce the temps solely through intercooling down to almost ambient (or below in the case of a monster chilled turbo[or supercharged] dragster). Also 15% is a common number but there is always improvement, by my math (calculating the density of air with the pressure held constant) for every 10% increase in air temps around the 100degF mark the air will get 3% less dense so going from 15% to 5% could net you a 3% gain in power(or just prevent a 3% loss). And while checking before and after iat temps while cruising won't tell him if his intercooler will keep up at wot it is a perfectly accurate way to check to see if his modifications have had a positive or negligible effect on the efficiency of his intercooler at speed. I would think that he has done some good work and found some valuable information that will help members of the forum out, but again I'm not the expert here and i'm always wiling to learn.