Quote:
Originally Posted by beta
Well but once the water heats up to the temperature of the incoming air, you no longer get any cooling.
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With air to water cooling you always have an extra radiator in the front to cool the water (and an extra water pump to circulate the water obviously).
It's a heat exchanger system, like an intercooler, only the transport medium is water.
One advantage of such a system is that the inlet manifold (usually aluminium in these systems) gets a bit cooled as well because it houses the (cold/cooled) heat exchangers. A normal aluminium inlet manifold will get hot by heat transferred from the cylinder head.
You can feel this very well on my ESS TS2 system, where the compressor is bolted on the inlet manifold (which is obviously bolted on the cylinder head).
If you feel the temperatures of the components after driving, you feel that the engine/cylinderhead is hot, the inlet manifold is cold and the compressor is hot.
So the air from the compressor is not only cooled by the heat exchangers themselves (situated in the manifold) but also by the walls of the manifolt itself (or rather: the walls of the manifold are not re-heating air coming from an intercooler
)