intercooler temps

[sambb]

Staying up late tonight for some upcoming nightshifts so figured I'd go and do some testing of the intercooler fan I'd finished wiring up. see here:

What did you do to your Polo today?

Its running automatically by monitoring core temperature at this stage. It worked really well. I found the following:

- at idle, and with everything heatsoaked (VAG com showing AIT of 40 degrees), the fan alone (without help from the water spray) will cool the core down to ambient easily, but can't go beyond that.

- at idle, with a squirt of water the fan could take the core from 35 to 25 degrees in 60 seconds and get below ambient for a bit too.

- however this seemed to not be able to prevent the AIT's as seen on vag com climbing at idle to 40 degrees in 24 degrees ambient. I got a bit worried about this thinking the whole thing was a fail (cold core but idle temps still hot) but then realised that the moment you pull away the temps were suddenly only 5 or so degrees above ambient. Do you guys with big air to air front mounts find this same thing with idle temps? or do you temps at idle not climb like that??

I think whats happening is that heatsoaked idle inlet temps are governed by the fact that only a dribble of air is trickling through the IC and then the baking hot plenum picking up lots of heat along the way. I'm sure a phenolitic spacer would help with this. The moment there is any flow though, the temps are then governed by the IC.

- I then went for a good hard drive and was stoked to see that my AIT's didn't go above 45 degrees. This was up and down through the gears, on and off boost stuff, not sustained full throttle stuff like you'd see on the track, but the temps were really consistent. The water spray always kept the peak temps down well but now with the fan the IC returns to a good base temp to start from between bursts. Prior to a decent fan the temps would just creep up and up.

Anyway at least now I don't have to nurse the car as much when its hot and can be confident that the IC will be as cool as possible for hillclimb starts after idling up to the line in the queue of cars.

sam

[HAR80N]

with my fmic at a stop it will go up a couple degrees then once i take off it drops back down the second i give it alittle gas