A set of AWE intercoolers were loaned for testing and shipped to me by 1illA6 on the Audizine forum. Other Audizine forum members King Fool, aysix, and S4 00 2.7 contributed funds to help with the shipping.
The frontal fin area of the AWE cores measures 8.25″ x 7.75″
The core depth is 3.5″
The inner diameter of the inlet and outlet pipes is 1-7/8″
There are 15 charge rows. The charge row is 8mm wide. The fin column width is 6mm. There are approximately 89 fins in a column. As you can see in the photo below, some of the fin columns have a rectangular pattern while other columns have triangular patterns, this led to a slight variation in the number of fins counted, the second column had 86 fins.
Flowbench results
Just to point out the obvious, on the driver side the ER IC slightly outflows the AWE IC, while on the passenger side the AWE IC slightly outflows the ER IC.
The ER and AWE IC’s are sequenced on the chart out of ease of creating the chart rather than representing which flowed more than the other. The ER had two consistent readings from driver to passenger side while the AWE had two readings with 11 CFM difference, but for both when the readings are averaged the resultant value is the same (within 0.25 CFM).
To try and determine if the end tank on the driver’s side was causing the extra pressure loss I employed a velocity probe. This is a new sensor attachment that I’ve just started to use. The depression through the IC core was brought up to 10″ H2O and then the probe was placed into the inlet pipe to assess the pressure at different spots inside the inlet.
This was not a controlled investigation, it was done mainly just to see what if any differences could be observed. What I found was that directly inside the end tank, where the air would flow straight in the depression read approximately 2-3″ H2O, when the probe was moved toward the outer edge of the end tank the depression increased to 4-5″ H2O.
A more detailed and planned out evaluation of the end tank design may yield some answers about the impact of the tank design on overall flow. Since the OEM S4 IC has a similar inlet design I will be able to investigate further using the stock intercooler while the AWE IC’s are returned to their owner.
