Pickup Trucks

The word intercooler has been banded about in car terms however it is beneficial to establish exactly what actually is its function?  Well we all know that if someone turbo charge or supercharge a vehicle we force air into the fuel system using a compressor of some sort. The turbocharger works by using the old exhaust gasses to drive the turbine round, while the supercharger requires a belt to get things working. With either method some heat is produced.

The compressed air gets hot because it gets squeezed by the two compressor blades. The problem actually happens when the hot air has to reach the engine. The hot air will actually be less dense. Therefore the less the combustion chamber in the engine can make use of it. This problem can be so great that if the temperature got too hot, the mixture could pre ignite and cause the engine to be destroyed extremely quickly by the pre ignition allowing another Milton keynes job for an engine re-builder.

The reason the air gets so heats up so much is because it is being highly compressed unlike ordinary air which gets to the engine via an air filter directly from the fresh air is fed in from the outside world and fed to the engine via an air filter this type of normal air will be quite cold. The use of compressed air is very good because it means we can get more air into a given space than if we tried to put it in normally. This is why a 2.0 litre turbocharged engine can do just as good a job performance wise as a normal aspiration engine twice its size can accomplice. Now as we said compressed air gets hot so a loss of power will be lost through the heat. This is the reason why the intercooler has to come into play.

The intercooler is a large type of air to air exchange radiator.  The intercooler is  normally between the supercharger or turbo and the inlet hose through to the engine inlet manifold.

The construction of the intercoolers are typically made up of aluminum as this cools the air a lot faster. There is generally an intake side, where the air passes into the intercooler, the air then passes along some straight tubes and between these tubes are fins very similar to a normal car radiator which then allows cool air to pass through these as the vehicle is traveling along. This will in effect cool the compressed air as it is running through the pipes and when the compressed air comes out the other side it should be cool enough to enter the engine. Now the bigger the intercooler the better job it should do.

So fitting a larger aftermarket  intercooler, normally offers much better results. For earlier cars that were fitted with turbos that did not have an intercooler fitted as standard, just adding one can also make some worthwhile improvements. There are also various suppliers who make specialist one offs for custom fittings.

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