Ford decided to use tube-and-fin construction for this intercooler instead of bar and plate. The difference between the two is pretty simple. Tube-and-fin intercoolers are more commonplace amongst stock applications. They are lighter and promote greater airflow through the core exterior. The trade-offs to these qualities are less heat transfer and more susceptibility to road damage.

Bar-and-plate intercoolers, however, have increased cooling efficiency over a tube-and-fin design. They are physically a stronger intercooler, meaning they can withstand more direct damage. The drawback here is weight. The greatest strength over tube-and-fin is a blessing and a curse in the sense that it has more thermal mass to work with, but it is a heavier item, adding some front end weight to your ride. Also, although it has a thicker core, this means more resistance to airflow than a tube-and-fin design. The core choice depends on which application the design is for, but those are the facts.

Back to the intercooler at hand. This unit has a height of 6 inches, and a width of 2.5 inches. From end tank to end tank, the length measures at 26 inches. Speaking of end tanks, these are constructed of plastic and we intend to fix that. As we all know, these end tanks are in a constant state of flux between hot and cold. This doesn’t bode well for the plastic because it can weaken over time, causing cracks in the surface, which would lead to – you guessed it – boost leaks. No one likes a boost leak. So we plan to incorporate aluminum end tanks to prevent this from ever happening.

Upon inspection, our engineer has also noticed that this intercooler has a fairly loose core construction. This means that fins inside the core are spaced relatively far apart. This is often the case with factory intercoolers, and there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with that. We are just going to improve it with a tighter core construction to allow for more heat transfer.

What’s Next?

The intercooler is out, so we will get to work on some design ideas. We are going to sample a few different designs and sizes to find the best balance of heat transfer, pressure drop and improved airflow. I’ll dive deeper into these aspects of the design in the next update.

Intercooler fitment is always a very important aspect of intercooler design. Since the pipes are connected to vital parts of the engine, the core needs to be in a place that allows flexibility in its connections for when the engine moves. This is why we need to devote time to checking, re-checking and then triple checking how parts fit. The closest we can get to seeing how our proposed design fits, is to make it a reality, so the lead engineer for this project has rigged up a wooden frame for the core and attached in-hose 3D-printed end tanks.

The prototype’s sample showed our other design ideas are suitable. While we plan to have a core volume of 924.59in³, which is an increase of 128% over stock, we intend to keep the factory intercooler shrouding intact as it will properly direct airflow to our intercooler. One thing that will have to be axed, though, is the active splitters that come with the car. There simply isn’t enough room to keep them with our much thicker core. The splitters are an interesting feature that comes with this car from factory, because they open up when air temperatures get too high and allows more airflow. However, now that the front face of our core is much closer to the front grill, plenty of constant airflow is better for performance over anything impeding that. After all, this is a performance upgrade. With a 32% increase in external fin surface area, we want as much air slamming the front of this intercooler as possible. On the bright side, it will ease and simplify the installation!

With our early stage prototype fitting as expected, we had to wait for our production samples to arrive at our headquarters, an easy enough step but sometimes gets repeated. We went through several samples and design changes, settling on one that we were comfortable with. They were fairly minor changes, but this process nevertheless delayed the project. However, we are back on track with brand new functioning samples ready to test, so let’s continue the progress. See below for shots of our core.

Our loaner 2013 Focus ST will go through dyno testing soon, equipped with the new intercooler prototype. It’s just a matter of first deciding which color to throw on the car!

With our intercooler, we wanted to bring on some positive effects for the power in this stubborn 2.0L engine. While power is important, we also needed to monitor the outlet temperatures with a visual analysis of heat transfer across the core.

One of our newer pieces of equipment is a neat little camera that detects thermal activity. It has been pivotal as our visual aid when looking at heat-soak and dispersion across stock intercooler applications, as well as our upgraded prototypes. We used it on our loaner ST to see how the stock unit handled the heat and how we could make it better.

With maximum temperature drops at the outlet of around 34˚ F, our intercooler will surge much cooler air through your intake manifold, which increases the potential for power and efficiency. This drop is substantial considering how heat soaked the stock unit was after the dyno run. Everything was done on stock intercooler pipes with no other modifications done to the car, so these results reflect what you should get out-of-the-box.

This outlet temperature drop can generally result in pressure fluctuations, which meant we had monitor pressure drop as well. We measured a drop of around 0.4 psi in the stock unit, while our prototype had a drop of 0.2 psi. Truthfully, this isn’t a staggering change as we can see that both units are good heat exchangers, but every bit still helps when it comes to airflow, especially for this car, since power is not easy to squeeze out.

With our core, we saw gains of up to 5hp and 7 ft-lbs of torque. The horsepower curve consistently stays above baseline, with the most impressive bumps being sustained in the more usable parts of the powerband. Torque had some surprising jumps early on in our dyno runs as well, which means you’ll really feel the gains early on.

Fitment

I mentioned in the previous update that we would be axing the active splitters. Due to space constraints, there wasn’t enough room for them to stay on. We will be keeping the factory shrouding that come inside the front bumper though.

Other than the omission of the active splitters, this is going to be a direct-fit upgrade. The color options will range from the gold pictured above, Sleek Silver, and Black. Our presale for this part starts in just a few weeks, putting a close to the ongoing R&D for this product.