It's been a while since I last updated this, so I'm sure the next few entries are going to go out of order.
The latest thing I've done is finally get around to doing a proper comparison of intercoolers! You can see the discussion in the
Intercooler Shootout: ATM vs Wagner EVO 2 Comp! thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FaRKle!
I've been playing with intercoolers over the past half year, and at my last track day at Laguna Seca I ran the View post on imgur.com . This past weekend I ran ATM's intercooler along with Wagner's EVO 2 Comp at Thunderhill (east). Both days were pretty hot (~95F) and I was able to get some good sessions in that were very comparable. All of these intercoolers will work with both the N20/26, N55, and N47 engines.
I used the Torque pro app in conjunction with an OBDLink LX bluetooth OBDII reader to log data at 4Hz. The car only reports temperature in 1C (1.8F) increments. From the data read, the "charge air cooler temp" is the temperature of the air after the intercooler (sometimes seen as IAT elsewhere). This was compared to the ambient air temp to see how well the intercoolers were cooling the pressurized air.
The car is a '17 328dx wagon with JR Tuning's stage 2 flash. The turbo will boost up to 29-30PSI. The turbo to intercooler and intercooler to intake manifold pipes are stock, since both are of the flexible rubber hose type on the 328d, and it makes swapping intercoolers much quicker (I was able to do the swap in under 30min at the end of the first day).
Here's a plot showing the difference in performance between the intercoolers. The ATM is consistently lower than the Wagner by 7-11F. I was surprised at this result given the EVO 2 Competition's description. One thing I noticed that ATM does on their core is that they have rounded header bars inside the end tanks to make the flow into the core smoother.
Here's the raw temperature data showing the charge air temps and ambient air temps. These two sessions were really well matched ambient temperature wise.
Over the next week I'll be logging commute data with the Wagner (got the ATM's data last week) so I can do a comparison on performance in "every day" driving. |