ALTA R56 Front Mounted Intercooler
The long awaited ALTA R56 Front Mounted Intercooler is ready for sale, and ready to make your R56 Faster!
As shown before with our initial testing (found here in a thread on NAM), the intercooler can make a big difference in power with the stock ECU tuning. Now add your custom ECU tuning, more boost, and maybe even a bigger turbo, and the intercooler becomes a vital part to keeping your engine making safe big power. The below graph shows our initial testing of our prototype intercooler.
While this graph shows it makes great power, this is with our more restrictive prototype core. This core, while not optimum, created a 10-20WHP gain and 20-30ft-lbs of torque gain, and made a very noticeable difference in how the car accelerated.
HORSEPOWER!!
We don’t use off the shelf cores and try to adapt them to our applications, we build our intercooler cores to fit our needs. While this process takes more time to get custom cores done, it allows us to tweak how the core is constructed and how it performs. We cannot only change the size of the overall core, but we can use different height fins and bars, or vary the amount of fins, and type of fins. From this we created an even better performing core you see today.
Why does the intercooler make more power than the stock one?? There are 2 main things that make an intercooler make HP. One is by cooling the air better. A cooler charge of air, means denser air, which means you can add more power to the engine with more fuel. (Luckily the ECU takes care of adding more fuel). The cooler air also makes the engine less prone to detonation/knock. The ECU is very smart and knows both of these things (by seeing the cooler air) and not only adds more fuel, but also adds more timing due to engine running safer.
The other reason that an intercooler can make more power is from it being less restrictive. This is defined by difference in pressure entering the core, and the pressure exiting the core. This “Pressure Drop” happens no matter what, but the variable is how much. While the variance from one to the next might be a couple PSI, this couple of PSI effects the overall boost getting into the cylinders and how hard the turbo has to work. If the turbo has to work harder, this can make the efficiency of the turbo worse, and push out hotter air.
STATS OF PROTOTYPE VS. FINAL DESIGN
So now you understand how our core makes more power, and you have seen our proven power. This is all with the more restrictive, less efficient Prototype core and tanks!
Our Prototype core showed a huge improvement over the stock core, by dropping the intercooler outlet temps as much as 40 degrees F. The Prototype core we measured roughly 3PSI of pressure drop across the core, where the stock one was around 2.2psi. Normally this would cause a loss in HP, but the above proves that the air temp being cooler is a big part of why it gains power.
With some tweaking of the charge tube count, charge tube heights, and fin count, the Final ALTA R56 core further improves upon both cooling and pressure drop. The intercooler outlet temps improved nearly 10 cooler degrees F, compared to our prototype. Cooler air means more power! The pressure drop of our prototype was a little high, so we looked to improve this the most. Again with some tweaking we got the pressure from about 2.8psi to a much more normal 1.5psi. So we improved both pressure drop and the cooling of the intercooler with our final version.
This info was something we have had for a while, now we have the dyno graphs to back up the new design not only being more effective, but also backing up the WHP it gains.
This test is with the prototype intercooler and final design ran back to back, and with-in minutes of each other. Just like we expected to see, more WHP at the upper RPMs. The above run was done quite a while after the initial testing, so the overall number isn't what to look at, but the change from one to the other. Not only is the overall WHP it gains very noticeable, but the ALTA FMIC looks really awesome on the car!
ALTA FMIC Construction
Our Prototype and Final design core uses the same basic type of core, known as bar and plate. There are 2 main types of cores, Bar and Plate, and Tube and Fin. While both do very similar jobs, they are very different cores. Bar and Plate (B&P) core are constructed using thin plates, and aluminum bars (extrusions) with fins placed in between all the parts. Its basically a big sandwich of plates, fins and bars. The thickness of each layer, and the density of fins can be change to create the optimum pressure drop and cooling ability. These are then baked in a vacuum, which brazes all the parts together, creating an intercooler core! While there are more parts, and more labor involved with building this type of core, they produce the best most solid type of core.
Tube and Fin (T&F) core are limited to their charge side thickness due to their construction. They are constructed using thin plates, and thin extruded tubes. Between each of these tubes, fins are placed and brazed together in an oven. The picture below shows the difference in cores. The downside is the charge side of the core cannot be as wide as a bar and plate, and also they are not very durable against rocks and road debris.
This intercooler is a simple one in that there is a core, and tanks. We explained why the core is made the way it is, next up is the tanks. Like all other ALTA intercoolers we use cast aluminum tanks. This type of tank gives us the freedom to create a perfect fitting, perfectly contoured and perfect internally smooth part. No sheetmetal here!
With this kind of data, and proof of concept, the ALTA FMIC is not going to be out done!
