Happy Monday SppolStreet!
If you're anything like me, you already need a Monday morning pick-me-up. Well, I have good news! Production for our sample intercooler will begin very soon, which means, yes you guessed it, a big update!
As always, check out the full write, and the gallery of our donar cars so far for this project up on our
Engineering Blog
Improving on a design that has already been tested and retested is never an easy task, but the engineers over at BMW always up the ante by having this pesky habit of living up to their moniker, "The Ultimate Driving Machine" which leaves little room for error.
I’ve always been a huge fan of BMW, especially when it comes to the meticulous engineering that goes into each and every one of their vehicles. Every model they put out is designed to last. Whether it be a 28-year old 3-series speeding around the flat back roads of New Jersey, or the much bigger and heavier X3 taking on the winding mountain roads of the Colorado Rockies with ease leaving a smile on your face also seems to be a design requirement. For most BMW owners, their thorough engineering and attention to detail is more than enough, and typically such thought in the design process shouldn’t lead to adverse characteristics, but we saw differently upon peeling back the front bumper cover of our loaner 335i.
There were a few recurring themes in the stock review of BMW’s intercooler which were the abundance of different forms of shrouds and duct work behind the bumper cover, the lack of space to work with, and the wide range of fitment our new design has to fit. These three factors left us with two different designs to choose from.
The first design that came to mind was to design our F2X/F3X intercooler similar to the unit we produced for the E9X 335i's, which would entail a bar and plate construction, and expand the core of the intercooler to the shrouding. We already have a general baseline of the performance value and fitment of this design, so it seemed like a no brainer. Almost.The problems we run into with this design would be the fact that for our E9X intercooler, we were only designing to fit one model, but this unit will have a much wider fitment range. Performance will potentially suffer with this design as well. With the thicker core, the airflow have more rows of fins to penetrate, and could be less efficient transferring heat from the intercooler.
Another viable design option was to stretch our new intercooler over the available space in the front of the Bimmer, with a tall and thin design. Filling the space between the primary radiator and the crash bar means having a core that has both an increase in volume and surface area over the stock heat exchanger. An additional benefit to this design would be a thinner core, meaning the heat can be transferred from the charged air more efficiently. There are of course some drawbacks to using this design as well. The biggest obstacle is operating around what keeps the car in one piece, the crash bar. The small price to pay for keeping you safe in the case of a crash is that this bar blocks airflow from the upper section of the intercooler. We plan on keeping the inlet diverter to make sure the full core is being used, but that won’t matter if there isn’t any airflow to a third of the core. On top of that there still the stock shrouding to contend with for fitment.
I would assume that many of you have already looked into aftermarket intercoolers for your F2X or F3X, so you know there's another option for a core design. Also, if you have been paying attention, I gave you guys a little teaser a few weeks ago, and I'm not confirming that our intercooler will, in fact, be a stepped core design.
Our new core will have a bar and plate construction, and replace the degradation prone plastic end tanks with aluminum tanks. To make sure that every fin on the core is being used to full potential, we are keeping with one part of the stock design to have diverters inside of the end tanks. We are increasing the core volume by 96% to a total of 963in³. All seem like standard improvements to an intercooler, but we decided to add one more addition which was the 115-degree angle of the top section of the core. The unique shape, in addition to our included shrouding will create a sealed passage for the airflow without blocking flow to the radiator.
Here's a look at the design renderings of our intercooler:
With our initial sample production only just starting we should have our first test unit back in Delaware in the coming weeks to start running our tests. Until then, feel free to ask any questions you might have!
Thanks!
-Nick