olddragger

iTrader: (3)

little expensive but interesting.
OD

rotarygod

I have a spare 2nd gen oil cooler lying around. The best way to see how well an idea works is to actually try it. I'll have to get someone to weld up end plates on it and a couple of radiator hose oulets but I may just try it. My car is taken apart right now so it may be a month or so until I get around to it. It would be a larger unit than the one pictured on ISC's website but I don't know how theirs is done interally. Oh well. I'm never afraid to the be guinea pig.

olddragger

iTrader: (3)

dont you have to have separate piping for the coolant and the oil? Afraid I dont understand how you will use the 2nd gen cooler by itself.
Have you seen the laniova cooler---high quality and good dimensions.
olddragger

olddragger

iTrader: (3)

Sorry thats Laminova oil-water cooler through Think Automotive in the UK.
OD

rotarygod

I thought I'd weld on "end tanks" to the oil cooler so that coolant will flow across the fins where air currently does. I have no idea how well it would work but there's only one way to find out.

Ajax

I have a really crazy idea for improving oil cooling and air conditioning at the same time, as well as removing the compressor from the car, but it's probably much more of an investment than some people would like to make. However, like many of my ideas, this one is probably semi far-fetched and not thought out well enough.

The basic concept utilizes the peltier effect and heat piping.
I think it would work very well, the question becomes pipe/pump sizing and airflow.
The basic concept is to create a cooling/heating tunnel or a pair of tunnels and run heat pipes through the tunnels.
Who knows.. maybe it'll work.. maybe i should just try to make it and see.

rotarygod

I see where you are going with that. That's an interesting idea.

Ajax

Some high school kids actually did it for air conditioning replacement and it worked very well. I seriously think this idea could work for just about everything in the car from oil to the intake air.
Who needs an intercooler when you have a thermoelectric system.

Red Devil

I guess I'm missing something. How would this replace the A/C system and cool the air?

Ajax

Peltier devices (thermo electric coolers) take a current applied in 1 direction and 1 side of the device gets hot, while the other side gets extremely cold, so cold that it'll form ice crystals on it at 12 volts.
Now, make an array of those in a circle, building you a cylinder of some kind, and put a fan at either end or in the middle, wherever you want.

When you apply forward current to the devices, the inside gets cold and the outside gets hot. Flow air through that and you have air conditioning. Reverse the polarity and you have heat.

The only thing left to do is cool the outside, which I have ideas on how to do as well.

rotarygod

Ice and lots of patience?

Ajax

You only get ice if you run TOO cold.
That was the point. You don't have to completely freeze out the entire chamber. You just want to run somewhere in the efficiency range of the peltier and keep it from freezing out.

rotarygod

It was sarcasm! I was responding to where you said "The only thing left to do is cool the outside, which I have ideas on how to do as well."

therm8

I'm kind of working on an idea for throttle body cooling using this exact method.

MazdaManiac

iTrader: (3)

I was just skimming, but I needed to correct this point.

The thermostat is a 180°F unit, which actually means it is wide open at 180°F and starts to open at 156°F.
It isn't an on/off switch for the coolant.
Furthermore, there is a thermostat bypass that allows some coolant flow, regardless of the thermostat position.

Also, I noted the presence of the Peltier effect somewhere here. Hopefully the interested parties understand the ENORMOUS electrical and thermal inefficiency of Peltier coolers. They are just barely useful in situations where the airflow is nearly static on the "cooled" side and roaring on the "heated" side.
To use the Peltier effect to extract heat from anyting on an automotive scale would require enormous amounts of power since it takes about 8 to remove one via this method.

rotarygod

Oh ****, good call. I totally missed that one.

dsmdriver

iTrader: (3)

I've only skimmed this, so forgive me if I'm repeating.

The turbocharged DSM's used oil/water oil coolers. It was a sandwich with the oil filter. They put this unit on where the normal oil filter went on the block that threaded on just like an oil filter. You screwed the oil filter onto this device. A coolant line went to this and away from it as well, and inside was a heat exchanger.

This was true of the '91+ cars. The 1990 had a air/oil cooler up in the corner like our cars do. So they felt that they could move from the air/oil to the water/oil and still get sufficent cooling. These turbo cars needed quite a bit of oil cooling as well.

Just a thought. The oil filter that goes on a 4G63 (the engine in a DSM/Lancer EVO) is the same size as an RX-8 so you might be able to just use one of these. Don't overtighten them though, since that crushes the internal structure and lets the oil and coolant mix.

Ajax

Well, I was aware of the inefficiencies, which is why the first design was used for air conditioning alone since you could eliminate the compressor itself, but it looks like this idea has already been trashed by folks all over the place. It came up a year ago and someone at work brought it up this week so I started thinking about it.

Initially, i figured you could put an oil cooler in said air tunnel (or just a heatpipe itself), and use convection to get hot oil to rise into it forcing the cooled oil to fall, so assuming it would work for air conditioning, it could work to cool oil, or any other liquid you could get into a heatpipe.
It'd complicate things though to start building return lines to and from this cooler.

The biggest problem I saw was the heat radiation coming off of the TECs themselves. What the hell do you do with it? You dont want it heatsoaking the entire engine bay.

Oh well.

therm8

My thought here was to use the copper heat pipes you can buy for computer processors to pull the heat off the TECs, and mount the entire assembly to the plastic undertray (offset from the radiator/condensor but still within the flow of air). But my application did not involve oil temps (only heat soak), so I could get away with a small water cooler. I can't imagine how much current would be needed to bring oil temps down. A small TEC can easily draw a few amps.

Ajax

That's almost exactly where I got the idea.
It was like a hybrid watercoling sytem.
The radiator (oil cooler) is used to disippate heat as rapidly as possible. The more airflow and surface area you have, the faster you'll cool it down.
The cooler the ambient air and or air flowing over the radiator, the faster it cools.
Would it even make a difference though?

HeavyMetal699

TEC's use enourmous amounts of energy. Phase change cooling is extremely efficient in terms of using energy.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...ad.php?t=38367

Good guide on how TEC's work.

Nubo

Any hints for those of us who don't know... ?

rotarygod

All will be revealed at Sevenstock!

Your hint is that it is being designed by someone VERY experienced with rotaries and in this country.

avakiannl

iTrader: (1)

IIRC the my 1983 FB had a stock oil to water cooler. May be an option to look into.

rotarygod

It was pathetically small though and was practically worthless on that car which is why they changed it to oil/air.