As an intercooler solution with the stock bumper? A brief description:

The CryOČ is a revolutionary new, award wining product designed to reduce the temperature of the air/fuel intake charge thus creating power. Through the science of aerodynamics and cryogenics, Design Engineering has developed a system to harness the cryogenic properties of liquid CoČ to lower the air/fuel intake charge by up to 60%. The system is modular and can be easily expanded. The CryOČ system provides two methods of cooling the air charge and one method of cooling the fuel charge, all utilizing the same burst of liquid CoČ. CoČ is readily available at any welding supply shop or where paintball guns are charged.

Now I've known about this product or some time, and I have been trying to come up with a reason to keep my nismo bumper instead of going with something else. Design Engineering has an intercooler sprayer that supposedly makes the intercooler 50% more effiicient. Has anyone considered this? The only set back I could see is having to refill the bottle but I think I could deal with it.

 

Ok since no responses with 36 views I did find an alternative if anyone wants to discuss. It seems like a water injection kit will work better than this system ever could..best of all it will likely allow you to keep the stock bumper.

 

This system is more expensive than a Nitrous intercooler spray. I don't know what the difference is in re-fill costs though - it may offset the additional cost.

You could still keep the stock bumper with this system.

 

My experience is that CO2 is less than half the cost of nitrous+ for refills.

 

If NO2 gets in your intake...you could go real lean . If the CO2 gets in...you will just bog down . You can get a gas chiller with the Cryo2 system too

 

The question I'd have is if the tanks used in such a system are approved for use in automobiles. Especially, whether or not they are approved by racing sanctions and the like so that you might be able to use such a system.

Secondly, I'd probably find this is useful only in drag racing. Any reasonable amount of track time on a road course will probably have you looking for a fill station somewhere. Nitrous Oxide will likely be more easily available at tracks.

Personally, I'd look to build a car that can handle the boost and conditions the car will be driven in. But if I had to choose, I'd favor a water spray on the intercooler over these methods. Water is easily available and quite cheap. Not sure how friendly tracks will be with water as an external spray though. Water on the race track is not the kind of condition that might be considered safe. While choosing a good nozzle size and flowrate can help control excess water, track officials probably won't trust people to put that much attention into details. Both CO2 and NO2 have the advantage that their boiling temperature is quite low. This means they can actually bring down I/C temps to lower than ambient, even prior to the start of a race as it actually boilds and absorbs the heat out of the air as it is released into the atmosphere. Water can, at it's best, lower the temp only as low as the temperature of the water itself. It's heat absorption capabilities should be quite good though as water absorbs a lot of heat when it evaporates.

In any case, I prefer not to see any of these systems used for street applications as I think of them more as band-aids to poor engineering or measures taken to extract every bit of power. We should all avoid the first scenarioo, and I doubt street cars really ever need the latter.

 

Water can be used in basically two complemetary ways :

a) water spray, on the outside front of the FMIC will most definately reduce heatsoak of the Intercooler. This soaking actually can occur "after" a boost event(s) and while "off" throttle. Once soaked , the sympotms manifest into a potential issue during the "next" boost event ( the FMIC has thermal memory).

b) water injection, though may mitigate the effects of heat soak, it does nothing to reduce the soak of the actual FMIC. Water injected into the intake tract occurs "after" the FMIC. Water injection raises the "effective" octane by a few points and cools the combustion chamber so that you may run either more boost and/or timing without detonation.

 

Keep debating I'll keep spraying.

 

you amaze me G3, it took a ton of reading and looking up info on the supra forums for me to figure out what you just posted here. Shooting water onto the FMIC really doesn't seem to do much (which makes me question why they put this on the STi now) not anything drastic at least. But injecting water into the intake tract is almost like having a second intercooler which not only cools the intake temperatures, it reduces the chances of detonation by lowering temperatures where pre-ignition would exist... and it cleans your engine to an extent. If you do a 50/50 mix with distilled water and methanol I think it raises the octane as well?

Either way I will be doing the water injection, from what I understand you can actually use the windshield wiper resevoir and even when mixed with methanol it is just as effective in keeping the windshield clean since that is what windshield washer fluid is.. Water/Methanol/Detergents.

I'm not looking to do any AutoX, maybe a few runs down the track at most. My number one concern is keeping the intake temperatures low and safe when using the stock bumper. I wouldn't have to gain one bit of horsepower, I'd even stand to lose a little if I know I'm safe with my set up.

 

Spraying water on an intercooler certainly does plenty. Where are you hearing otherwise? g3po never said that. Part of what g3po mentions is that heatsoak can occur after a boost event. Intercoolers do not heat up and cool down as fast as the charge air inside it. As ambient air flows through the fins, it wil contantly cool the I/C as long as the I/C is wamrer than the ambient air. But the intake air does not constantly heat up the I/C. The intake air is only hot when boosting. Intercoolers are not only designed to transfer this heat into the ambient air passing through the fins, it is also designed to act as a heat sink, storing the heat from the intake charge. Why does it need to do this? Few intercoolers will be efficient enough to be able to shed the heat into the ambient air as fast as the I/C absorbs the heat from the charge air. When this occurs, the I/C actually begins to heat up. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It means it is doing what it is supposed to. The I/C will cool off some in off-boost driving. As I mentioned before, an I/C is continuously shedding heat. And during off boost driving, not only is the movement of the vehicle still forcing ambient air through the fins to help cool the air, the charge air is cooler than the I/C and it will actually pull heat away from the I/C internally as the intake air passes through it. This will heat up the I/C slightly.

So why spray water? To shed heat faster. When you spray water onto the I/C, it does 2 things. It adds slightly more mass. Heat will immediately begin to transfer from the I/C into the cooler water drops. Then as the water heats up and as ambient air flows around the water drops, it will start to evaporate. When water evaporates it absorbs heat. This occurs both from spraying water onto the I/C and in water injection. Keeping an intercooler lightly coated with water at all times means, it will be shedding heat faster at all times. IN a sytem that has a large I/C for the apoplication, then the effects wil not be as great as the I/C probably won't see heat soak. Small I/C(relative to the application) can see heatsoak and this may be a great way to band-aid the problem. But anytime you keep an I/C cooler, the efficiency is higher. As an intercooler gets hotter, it becomes less and less effective at reducing the temperature of the charge air.

 

CKwik, I agree with what you're saying totally. I didn't say that spraying the intercooler would be useless, I am saying that it will not make a drastic change in intake temperatures.

What I've learned is coming from supra owners and the shop that is installing the APS kit for me. (300zx.com) Although APS has stated that the stock bumper is sufficient at 8psi, I'd still like to have peace of mind as it pertains to detonation/predetonation. All I'm saying is that spraying water onto the intercooler wouldn't give me that peace of mind from what I have seen, therefor I like the water injection better.

 

That would depend though. As I said, as the I/C heats up efficiency drops. If the I/C is heatsoaking or running too warm all the time, the difference could be drastic. There are many factors associated with this, of course. If you have peace of mind issues with your set-up, I'd look at the tuning and hardware and make sure those are sufficient for the task at hand. From what it sounds like, you have concerns with the parts being able to handle the boost and fuel delivery even without intercooler efficiency issues. While I will regard water injection as a great method for reducing the likelihood of detonation occurring, I do consider it a band-aid unless used for quick bursts of boost and the like.

 

Ultimately I just want to be able to keep my nismo bumper and not worry about the intercooler being inefficient. My understanding is that the less efficient the intercooler the higher the intake temperatues will be which contribute to predetonation. Actually the only time I would be really concerned is on the hot summer days here in georgia, I'd just like to know every once in a while I can go to the drag strip and do a few runs at WOT without cooling issues. In my day to day driving I doubt I'd hit full boost on a continual basis, not during 90 degree summer days at least.

Although water injection could be considered more of a quick fix than anything, I think it would be well worth it. We all know of the issues with the VQ35 and boost and its obvious that the stock bumper is a lot more restrictive than on other cars, I guess its just that extra ounce of prevention you know?

 

I have run WI regularly in the past with SCs that had no FMIC, so it was one of few choices.

Something to be "very" careful about though, if you tune to take advantage of the intra-cooling effect (extra boost and/or timing), you better make sure you have some form of failsafe system in place. For example a J&S safeguard and a water psi gauge, could be used as a safety net , in case of pump failure, nozzle plugging etc....

What I was trying to say is that if one wants to get the maximum effect out of water cooling methods , IC spraying and WI can be used in a "complementary" fashion.

Now if the FMIC is large enough for the application and there is ample airflow over the FMIC (not so with the OEM G35 bumper) , then the benefit of spray is less effective. It is also less effective in humid climates. Here in Cali it works very well (efficient evaporative cooling). For exmaple a "swamp cooler" work nil in Fla.

Honestly I would still recommend opening up the bumper is the "first" and most pragmaitc line of heatsoak defense.