Quote:
Originally Posted by mohammad
random list of cooling system ideas i have.
1. You could run the electric pump while car is off to more effictively warm up engine via block heater. But they also make thermosiphon coolant heaters that do this aswell.
2. you could potentially combine this with an alternator delete and stop using the serpentine belt all together assuming your car had a serpentine belt driven water pump.
3. You could try and make the engine warm up faster by adding a valve to the heater core so it isn't warmed up when heat is not needed.
4. You could buy a thicker more fin dense radiator to reduce the size of radiator needed. But this has its own aero dynamic losses
5. You could increase thermal mass of the cooling system so that short bursts of heat like flooring it to pass a car won't cause your car to overheat. You could do this using a massive coolant tank like this one: Link removed as i dont have enough posts on here
6. in alternative to above you could wire the car to turn on the cabin heater when the engine starts to overheat.
7. you could stack an oil cooler in front/behind the radiator to have more cooling with less frontal area.
8. you could use a smaller pulley on the water pump to overdrive it and make it spin faster.
9. you can design your system with the expectation that the car will overheat in certain situations.
10. Instead of doing all this work you could go buy a toyota prius which has adaptive aerodynamic grill block which is basically what you want.
Fundamentally your car will likely over heat when the rpms are high. The engines already spinning the water pump very fast, im doubtful you will go much faster with your electric setup. You will also have some very high losses. 40-50% at the alternator, then more at the pump as it produces heat.
I was wondering what would happen if you integrated the radiator with the turnk lid and used a combination of a fan and the natural vacuum when the cars in motion to have cooling with virtually no aerodynamic losses.
you can always try to dissipate heat like the old porsche race cars did. By running oil through the car frame.
Alot of vehicles like the prius already use an electric water pump but thats probably more for the reduced warm up time.
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A number of interesting ideas there, not all suitable for my car though. I've got an oil cooler mounted in front of the water cooler, but it's probably not doing much good. I'm considering swapping to an oil-to-water heat exchanger as that could give me a quicker oil warm up, especially in the winter when we see temps around 0-10 celsius. Not sure what control strategy I want though.
The real benefits would come from running a smaller radiator inlet, so the only way to get that without risk of overheating is efficient ducting and possibly greater water flow. Dumping heat in the cabin is something I want to avoid.
Reports that electric water pumps don't match engine driven pumps are discouraging. Maybe I'll have to run two pumps! For road use I'm only running to 3000 RPM on the highway, with higher bursts in the lower gears. The engine temperature rises when stuck in traffic, and the low water flow when the engine is idling must be an issue.
Can anyone point me at water pump flow-vs-rpm data?