Definitive solution for M12 intercooler
Discussion
Dear All,
Having spent close on a year or more looking into this problem I am pleased to report that I think we now have an answer. I must first make it clear that the guy who developed this, Matt Faulks, (who posts here on Pistonheads) is going to make this a commercial product but as we are 99% there he has agreed that I can make this posting to give you all the heads up. He will formally release the product when he’s happy and when he’s got some documented readings rather than our “put your hand on that and feel how cold it is” assessments but we were both so pleased I managed to persuade him to let me make this post now. I reckon we are 2 weeks away from the dogs danglys. We tested the near final production version on my car on Saturday and the results were nothing short of astonishing. Despite what is being said about fans for the IC we proved today you do not necessarily need fans to get the induction air down to the magic 40'c.
Basicaly there is a two stage process to the solution;
Stage 1
Although we know the airflow over the M12 IC is minimal it is not zero, there is some air flowing but its just not enough to get the standard IC to function. One option is to make “bigger” i.e deeper cored versions of the existing IC. These are generally thicker from front to back. However they don’t work because whatever little extra cooling you get is counterbalanced by the disadvantages of having even more metal to act as a heat sink and even greater volumes of air in the induction tracts.
Rather than “go large” Matt’s solution was to go for a more efficient version of the current IC, to apply science to the problem. This would wring every last drop of cooling ablility from what little air was flowing. We tested it yesterday at Plans Motorsports’ place in Dunsfold. This is a brand new high performance intercooler specifically designed for the M12. I won't go into the technical details but its been designed by Matt, an acknowledged expert in the field, and fabricated to F1 standards. The core is a new super efficient design. The tubes have a greater internal surface area with full width internal vanes and external fins that are computer controlled oven brazed. This means that the external fins get brazed to the core tubes along the entire length of each fin. The fin to tube contact is thus seamless metal to metal and not the usual mechanical gripping you find in most cores. The cores themselves are actually made by people who do rads and coolers for the F1 teams. Anyway I’m sure he’ll fill you in on the details but the bottom line is that the thermal transfer efficiency of this core is orders of magnitude greater than the standard one.
On the bench this new core will improve the temp drop by 20'c or more over the standard one. His design also has smaller end tanks which reduces the overall volume.
It’s designed as a swap out. It took less than an hour to fit, you'll need to pop a few of the rivets in the IC box shrouding to enable you to flex the walls apart, but its nothing beyond a competent Noble owner. Fittings and overall size wise its a direct swap replacement. 4 bolts and 3 circlips and a couple of rivets is all that's involved.
Then we took the car and gave it some sustained blasts around the perimeter of Dunsfold (showing some prospective Midengined sportcars series entrants)
getting it nice and hot under the rear clam. Now my car is down on power at the moment and is only boosting to 0.6 but driving it there was no doubt
that it had a crisper response to the throttle and I could detect no power drop off at all. Each time we came back we lifted the clam and felt the IC
and found that the outlet end was so cold if felt it had been refrigerated.
Unfortunately I'd forgotten my pyro but the temperature difference between the inlet and outlet ends was dramatic. We all reckoned that the outlet side of the tank was at close to ambient temperature. Now in similar conditions the standard IC's outlet temp on my car is a documented 55'C. Everyone
present confirmed that this new IC was far colder to the touch than the standard one was. So with this IC on an M12 you do not need fans or scoops or ducts or anything else. I really was very very impressed.
However we must remember this was on a bloody chilly day so what happens in Spain, the USA, SA or dare I say on a sunny midsummers track day in England? The hotter the ambient air the hotter everything will be below the clamshell.
Stage 2
Having proven it works on its own on a cold day the next step is to fit an internal air temperature sensor that will be used to drive a fan fitted to the back of the new IC. This mod is being fabricated at the moment. The temp sensor will hang in the actual air flow, it will not be sensing the temp of the plating of the outlet tank or the wall of the tubing that external ones sense but the actual temperature of the air as it leaves the IC. The switch will also be "latching" in the sense that once triggered it will stay triggered until the air temp falls below 38’c – in other words it will stay on as long as you need it to.
Matt says this, with the wiring loom, will be ready at the end of this week so I’ll post a further update as soon as I can. After that I reckon the job will be done. In the meantime I've posted some pics on my smugmug gallery (also some of the failed air scoop) so have a look. Matt hopes to have it available for sale pretty soon but I’ll leave that up to him.
I'm pretty confident that this is going to be the definitive soultion to the problem.
Oh and for the cynical – no I’m not on a commission.
Regards
Paul C
Having spent close on a year or more looking into this problem I am pleased to report that I think we now have an answer. I must first make it clear that the guy who developed this, Matt Faulks, (who posts here on Pistonheads) is going to make this a commercial product but as we are 99% there he has agreed that I can make this posting to give you all the heads up. He will formally release the product when he’s happy and when he’s got some documented readings rather than our “put your hand on that and feel how cold it is” assessments but we were both so pleased I managed to persuade him to let me make this post now. I reckon we are 2 weeks away from the dogs danglys. We tested the near final production version on my car on Saturday and the results were nothing short of astonishing. Despite what is being said about fans for the IC we proved today you do not necessarily need fans to get the induction air down to the magic 40'c.
Basicaly there is a two stage process to the solution;
Stage 1
Although we know the airflow over the M12 IC is minimal it is not zero, there is some air flowing but its just not enough to get the standard IC to function. One option is to make “bigger” i.e deeper cored versions of the existing IC. These are generally thicker from front to back. However they don’t work because whatever little extra cooling you get is counterbalanced by the disadvantages of having even more metal to act as a heat sink and even greater volumes of air in the induction tracts.
Rather than “go large” Matt’s solution was to go for a more efficient version of the current IC, to apply science to the problem. This would wring every last drop of cooling ablility from what little air was flowing. We tested it yesterday at Plans Motorsports’ place in Dunsfold. This is a brand new high performance intercooler specifically designed for the M12. I won't go into the technical details but its been designed by Matt, an acknowledged expert in the field, and fabricated to F1 standards. The core is a new super efficient design. The tubes have a greater internal surface area with full width internal vanes and external fins that are computer controlled oven brazed. This means that the external fins get brazed to the core tubes along the entire length of each fin. The fin to tube contact is thus seamless metal to metal and not the usual mechanical gripping you find in most cores. The cores themselves are actually made by people who do rads and coolers for the F1 teams. Anyway I’m sure he’ll fill you in on the details but the bottom line is that the thermal transfer efficiency of this core is orders of magnitude greater than the standard one.
On the bench this new core will improve the temp drop by 20'c or more over the standard one. His design also has smaller end tanks which reduces the overall volume.
It’s designed as a swap out. It took less than an hour to fit, you'll need to pop a few of the rivets in the IC box shrouding to enable you to flex the walls apart, but its nothing beyond a competent Noble owner. Fittings and overall size wise its a direct swap replacement. 4 bolts and 3 circlips and a couple of rivets is all that's involved.
Then we took the car and gave it some sustained blasts around the perimeter of Dunsfold (showing some prospective Midengined sportcars series entrants)
getting it nice and hot under the rear clam. Now my car is down on power at the moment and is only boosting to 0.6 but driving it there was no doubt
that it had a crisper response to the throttle and I could detect no power drop off at all. Each time we came back we lifted the clam and felt the IC
and found that the outlet end was so cold if felt it had been refrigerated.
Unfortunately I'd forgotten my pyro but the temperature difference between the inlet and outlet ends was dramatic. We all reckoned that the outlet side of the tank was at close to ambient temperature. Now in similar conditions the standard IC's outlet temp on my car is a documented 55'C. Everyone
present confirmed that this new IC was far colder to the touch than the standard one was. So with this IC on an M12 you do not need fans or scoops or ducts or anything else. I really was very very impressed.
However we must remember this was on a bloody chilly day so what happens in Spain, the USA, SA or dare I say on a sunny midsummers track day in England? The hotter the ambient air the hotter everything will be below the clamshell.
Stage 2
Having proven it works on its own on a cold day the next step is to fit an internal air temperature sensor that will be used to drive a fan fitted to the back of the new IC. This mod is being fabricated at the moment. The temp sensor will hang in the actual air flow, it will not be sensing the temp of the plating of the outlet tank or the wall of the tubing that external ones sense but the actual temperature of the air as it leaves the IC. The switch will also be "latching" in the sense that once triggered it will stay triggered until the air temp falls below 38’c – in other words it will stay on as long as you need it to.
Matt says this, with the wiring loom, will be ready at the end of this week so I’ll post a further update as soon as I can. After that I reckon the job will be done. In the meantime I've posted some pics on my smugmug gallery (also some of the failed air scoop) so have a look. Matt hopes to have it available for sale pretty soon but I’ll leave that up to him.
I'm pretty confident that this is going to be the definitive soultion to the problem.
Oh and for the cynical – no I’m not on a commission.
Regards
Paul C
This sounds great.
Just Idle curiousity Paul but did you consider having a very short (3 inches maybe) but wide (width of roof) intercooler mounted on the roof ala - RS200 style?
see here:
www.harrys-fordpage.com/RS200%205.jpg
Just Idle curiousity Paul but did you consider having a very short (3 inches maybe) but wide (width of roof) intercooler mounted on the roof ala - RS200 style?
see here:
www.harrys-fordpage.com/RS200%205.jpg
V6GTO said:
It seems hard to believe that it can make such a difference when it looks so similar. I'm looking forward to the hot weather testing (if you're looking for a volunteer...) for obvious reasons, and would be interested at the right price.
Martin.
Two things that look the same are capable of being drastically different internally!
slinky
gizard said:
This sounds great.
Just Idle curiousity Paul but did you consider having a very short (3 inches maybe) but wide (width of roof) intercooler mounted on the roof ala - RS200 style?
see here:
www.harrys-fordpage.com/RS200%205.jpg
I didn't but to do this would require drastic re-plumbing and re-jigging of the engine bay. A drop in replacement's got to be the way to go.
Regards
Paul C~
Hello
we have the solution!
recently the NOBLE M400 has done 2min 06sec at MONZA circuit in road version.
Consider that we are in Italy and MONZA is the fastest circuit in EUROPE where teh temperature goes to the moon!!
we changed the intercooler with one 2 time and half bigger with 4 small fans front and rear.
We shift the filters has the 2.5 litre, in front.
We have done many many checking of everything and this is the best solution without change the body shape ( that is not propelly a good areodinamic shape especially for rear intercooler!).
No problem of overheating!
we will sell also the kit for the others NOBLE m12.
>> Edited by elisek on Monday 21st February 15:09
we have the solution!
recently the NOBLE M400 has done 2min 06sec at MONZA circuit in road version.
Consider that we are in Italy and MONZA is the fastest circuit in EUROPE where teh temperature goes to the moon!!
we changed the intercooler with one 2 time and half bigger with 4 small fans front and rear.
We shift the filters has the 2.5 litre, in front.
We have done many many checking of everything and this is the best solution without change the body shape ( that is not propelly a good areodinamic shape especially for rear intercooler!).
No problem of overheating!
we will sell also the kit for the others NOBLE m12.
>> Edited by elisek on Monday 21st February 15:09
johnpest said:
Can you send pics of the large 'italian' intercooler. I am going to go this route with at least 2 fans .
I am also going to have the exhaust, headers, turbos ceramic coated ( exhaust, headers inside & out) as well as silencer to reduce thermal load and heat sink.
John
we tested many things both on 3R and M400.
Always at MOnza that is the best test circuit for NOBLE.
The car with our intercooler run without problems and with our costumer took a 2.06 that it's faster that any PORSCHE GT3!
on the most advantage circuit for PORSCHE because MONZA has HUGE strait line!
and engine is alway top temperature and the original intercooler is not enough.
Not necessary different exhaust or turbo coat.
m12_nathan said:
But a bigger intercooler leads to a worse throttle response and all it is doing is delaying the heatsoak - the Faulks intercooler covers both of those issues.
absolutelly not!
the car works as usual, only the temperature is always down so you have always maximum power!
consider that the M400 do the PARABOLICA bend at 120 mph!!
m12_nathan said:
A bigger internal volume of intercooler will lead to worse throttle response surely? Joust - we need your physics brain...
Not even physics. Bigger intercooler meens more volume to pressurise. So longer to achieve boost...
That's why charge coolers are good. Very little volume to fill. In most other respects they are a bit of a nightmare though...
All,
Thanks for the positive comments. If anyone has any questions please feel free to drop me an e-mail either via the site or my profile, or of course post a message up.
When developing this upgrade several elements were taken into consideration, in order of importance - Charge cooling, IC core temp control, flow capacity, pressure drop and weight. We did not want to offer a solution to one element of the problem whilst negatively effecting the performance of another key area - e.g. trading core temp control for charge cooling performance.
Paul pointed out one of the issues with thick core units in his orignal post but I will just add in areas of poor ambient air flow (such as the M12's IC box) a thick core can become an issue due to only the upper surface of the core being effectively cooled by ambient airflow. Also its worth noting if you double the tube length/surface area you will also very nearly double the drag the tube surfaces create which obviously negatively impacts the flow capacity of the IC. We were also loathe to produce a unit with a considerable increase in internal volume as it can lead to a reduction in transient throttle response and an increase in turbo lag. Our unit has smaller capacity end tanks than standard, this coupled with the increased flow capacity gives better transient throttle response.
In reply to Martin - put simply the ability of our IC to transfer heat from the charge, through the core and to the ambient air flow is considerably greater than the standard unit.
Gizard - If you look at the shape of the RS200's roof you'll notice it actively ducts airflow to the intercooler, compare that to the shape of the M12's roof, a similar setup on the M12 would require the IC mounted much further above the roof line, or a reshape of the roof.
Nathan/Phil - Your spot on.
Best Regards
Matt
Thanks for the positive comments. If anyone has any questions please feel free to drop me an e-mail either via the site or my profile, or of course post a message up.
When developing this upgrade several elements were taken into consideration, in order of importance - Charge cooling, IC core temp control, flow capacity, pressure drop and weight. We did not want to offer a solution to one element of the problem whilst negatively effecting the performance of another key area - e.g. trading core temp control for charge cooling performance.
Paul pointed out one of the issues with thick core units in his orignal post but I will just add in areas of poor ambient air flow (such as the M12's IC box) a thick core can become an issue due to only the upper surface of the core being effectively cooled by ambient airflow. Also its worth noting if you double the tube length/surface area you will also very nearly double the drag the tube surfaces create which obviously negatively impacts the flow capacity of the IC. We were also loathe to produce a unit with a considerable increase in internal volume as it can lead to a reduction in transient throttle response and an increase in turbo lag. Our unit has smaller capacity end tanks than standard, this coupled with the increased flow capacity gives better transient throttle response.
In reply to Martin - put simply the ability of our IC to transfer heat from the charge, through the core and to the ambient air flow is considerably greater than the standard unit.
Gizard - If you look at the shape of the RS200's roof you'll notice it actively ducts airflow to the intercooler, compare that to the shape of the M12's roof, a similar setup on the M12 would require the IC mounted much further above the roof line, or a reshape of the roof.
Nathan/Phil - Your spot on.
Best Regards
Matt
V6GTO said:
Matt,
Please don't get me wrong, I wasn't saying I thought what youd'e done was rubbish, quite the opposite, I think it's incredible, and it's just my pea sized brain found it hard to comprehend!.
Martin.
Martin,
Don't worry chap, I was in 'engineer' mode when writing the above hence the lack of smilies etc. I got where you were coming from
I'm happy to explain any aspects of the IC package. Regs
Matt
P.S. In a 35 degree ambient the difference between the standard unit and ours will be even more profound
>> Edited by matt_t16 on Monday 21st February 21:31
m12_nathan said:
A bigger internal volume of intercooler will lead to worse throttle response surely? Joust - we need your physics brain...
Definitely true. However, how much worse is the key.
As i understand it, take peak hp and multiply by 1.5 to get a rough measure of airflow in CFM's.
360hp x 1.5 = 540 CFM's = 9 cubic feet per second
Let's say you have an enormous intercooler with a .5 cubic foot internal tube volume. Complete aspiration of the core happens in less than .056 of a second at full power on the GTO-3R.
Hey Guys
we are not talking about Noble Intercooler without know anything!
we have tested them for 1 year at MONZA and we know perfectly how get the best NOBLE without heating problems!
Our intercooler is the right solution, you need just it.
About the response at the trottle, is it the same as the position of the intercooler is not changed!
if you move the intercooler far from the engine you get a late response of trottle.
that's it!!
we waist so much time to find the right solution that you cannot image!
but know we have a full power NOBLE without change shape o hole the body, with few money invested and without increase weight!
we are not talking about Noble Intercooler without know anything!
we have tested them for 1 year at MONZA and we know perfectly how get the best NOBLE without heating problems!
Our intercooler is the right solution, you need just it.
About the response at the trottle, is it the same as the position of the intercooler is not changed!
if you move the intercooler far from the engine you get a late response of trottle.
that's it!!
we waist so much time to find the right solution that you cannot image!
but know we have a full power NOBLE without change shape o hole the body, with few money invested and without increase weight!
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