Having logged and monitored my oil and water temps in the past, it seems like our water temps have a lot more headroom than our oil temps do in most conditions. In other words, it's always seemed that the radiator had more cooling capacity left on the table, and the problem was just that there's not much that can do to help the oil temps (since the only xfer between the two is through the engine block).
The oil:air coolers we've been adding to the cars directly cool the oil at the expense of cutting into the cold airflow budget of the radiator, and still the radiator system copes fine on temps (at least in part because keeping the oil cooler reduces the load on the system in general). Any sort of oil:water interface is only going to increase the thermal coupling between the two bringing them more into balance and keeping everything cooler.
The small unit at the filter may not be "enough" cooling to track without additional oil cooling (because it doesn't look big enough to transfer enough heat between the two), but I definitely think it will help, and that it will reduce the size requirements for any additional oil:air cooling needed while also removing some of the warmup problems we have today with just oil:air.
Getting your oil to 280 is going to cause problems regardless, and the point of this is to make that less likely than before, not to make 280F oil temps sustainable or tolerable.
The big real-world data point in favor of this system is AM Performance's track system. They're using a slightly larger and better-designed oil:water interface, on a slightly better radiator, and running in long hard real race conditions without additional oil:air cooling.
Last edited by wstar; 10-19-2011 at 11:05 AM.
|