I know there are various products out there to help prevent heat soak in our intercoolers, but I was wondering if anyone's ever tried just using something like dynamat or other sound/heat dampeners?

Or would it just melt and make a mess and not really do anything.

J

 

Wouldn't dynamat insulate the heat being generated inside the IC? Instead of dissipating it? To say nothing of it's melting point which is probably far below external IC temps.

 

My thought was to try and insulate the IC from the heat that rises from the engine. I thought there used to be an aerogel product that did the same thing, to prevent heat soak, I may have been thinking of something else though.

I think you're right though that it would melt.

 

Dynamat will melt. I used some for a hose, to keep it rubbing in the engine, it melted enough.

There is an aerogel, but you have to have an alta flow through IC, otherwise the mat will just stop the air flow thru the OEM IC.

Another option is to coat the IC with a certain kind of paint, to prevent heat soak. There's a whole article somewhere here on nam, and or the Internet, where a guy tested like 4 ic's, an alta, OEM, a GP, and some coated ones. The GP and the coated ones did best!

 

Awesome info Astro! Thanks! I could see possibly some kind of ceramic coating maybe to help with heat soak, but the GP is definitely the best way to go.

I'll search for the coated IC's.

 

Sound insulation is exactly the opposite of what you're looking for. Acoustic insulation is essentially the addition of mass to damp vibration and a polymer that dissipates vibrations by converting it to (small amounts) heat.

A coating will also take you in the wrong direction as they are not generally more thermally conductive than the aluminum your intercooler should already be made of. Last time I looked at it, there was some obscure company doing brake coatings for Porches to dissipate heat but I don't believe there would be much more than a minimal effect on heat conduction/radiation away from the source simply by adding a thin coating. I recall a pissing match with "some guy" who just had to have his point about a thermally conductive coating, but I've worked with this stuff in a lab for several years and the results just don't materialize. All things being equal, the black powdercoated Alta IC will perform measurably worse than the bare one even though the difference might only be slight. I'd still take the black intercooler for cosmetic reasons although it'd be better to anodize it. You could also plate your intercooler with some exotic higly radiative/conductive metal but again, it wouldn't buy you much of anything and would only show an advantage under highly specific conditions which you will never see in every day driving.

I also did some heat transfer studies with aerogel on O2 sensors several years ago and got some interesting results. The goal was to keep the PTFE bushing the wires come out of from getting heat soak due to the "hot side" sensor components. Just putting a small blanket of insulation where we normally had an air gap inside the sensor yielded about a 20 degree C drop in temperature IIRCC but a slight rise in the average temperature on the hot side of the O2 sensor. Not a functional issue, but a notable difference. The summary was that assembly components (like your intercooler) can be thermally isolated to manipulate their operating temperature but at the expense of increased average temperature elsewhere - you can't get rid of the total amount of heat, just move it around to some extent. In the case of aerogel, it also outgasses at the temperatures I was using it and contaminated the O2 reference air.

You could make an intercooler from copper, which would be your most effective heat exchange but it would be at some ridiculous expense, I'm sure. A less expensive option, since it looks like you're getting the ECU remapped anyway, would be to add a water/methanol injection system and make sure to have the car tuned to run without it so you are only using the benefits of reduced intake temperatures. More effective than an intercooler as well.