Water to Air A/C condenser ... Feasible?

[cheekychimp]

I picked up a Griffin top to bottom intercooler that I really wanted to put on the daily driver, but fitting it with the JDM bumper whilst retaining the A/C is proving to be too much fabrication than I really want to invest in for the daily driver and I can't remove the A/C in a tropical climate.

So seeing as water to air intercoolers are proven technology, could you build a water to air A/C condenser? It is only a heat exchanger isn't it? Has anyone heard of anything like this? It is more fabrication admittedly and it might not come to anything but I wondered if it might also make the A/C cooler given that water is far more efficient at removing heat than pure airflow. Is sizing critical in this application and would something like a laminova core work?

 

[curtis]

Paul sizing is going to be the critical thing. On my take home section of my final exam for thermo it was pretty much the same question. It was tracing out a ac side of a heat pump. That question took hours and hours to do, I got it right down to 4 decimal points but sucked the whole time. And yes water is more efficient I think its 4 times more efficient latent heat of evaporation but you'll have to put in a front heat exchanger for it and be back to the same mess your already in. Now as for the laminovas the way they seal in a tube is with Orings to put then in a ac system they would have to be inserted in the tube then tig welded into place because I bet the oring would pass freon to the water and water to the freon when the pressure hits it even on the low side. High side would definitely blow the o-rings.

Something else during design phase the laminovas are rated at "efficient to 150 HP each" by all the stuff I've read but that could have been some guys estimate and everyone just run with it. I don't think I've ever seen where the guys in sweden rated their cores. But then we would have to know what the ac system in the car needs and wouldn't even know where to look up that data.

 

[cheekychimp]

Oh dammit .... !

 

[Barnes]

Buy a different intercooler core. Retain OEM A/C components. Live happily ever after.

Curtis: For air/water heat transfer water is a fantastic heat transfer medium because of the very high specific heat capacity. Also being a liquid it gives much larger convection coefficents. All this adds up to very rapid heat transfer medium. The water also holds a large amount of energy which is useful in a closed system like the ones being discussed.

The latent heat of vaporization only comes into play when you are actually boiling/evaporating water out of the system to provide the cooling. That doesn't come into play in this case.

If you really wanted to be ridiculous, you could run an air/water heat exchanger for the intercooler and the A/C. You could then have one shared water heat exchanger in the front that both share. That would keep things simple. But, I'll stick with my advice in the first line of this post. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[cheekychimp]

Yeah well funny you should say that because Ken is putting an ARC EVO III intercooler on the car as we speak. He said it is ample for the 16G series turbos and that he can fit it in a day without touching the factory A/C system as opposed to two weeks of fabrication for the Griffin unit. He also said he doesn't think the Griffin would prove to be significantly better.

I was just under the impression that the top to bottom Griffin cores were supposed to work really well for around 300 hp to 400 hp with minimum pressure loss so I was really anxious to see how it would work out.