anyone ever messed with these? Fundamentally the concept is real, but are these just a play off of nitrous?

http://www.stylinconcepts.com/parts.cfm/partfamilyid/1160/SubCategoryID/111

Might as well just spray N2O down the throat:ro)

Probably works, but the fact you have to constantly pay for something that is used up other than gas makes it a whole lot less desireable.

This thing came up over on a watercraft board. I ran a CFD simulation to get an idea of how much cooling could be done with the small surface area of the bulb. The flow I put through it was more representative of the flow to a turbocharged 1.2L 4 cyl.

The game is to lower density by cooling, hopefully without the pressure drop cancelling out the density gain from cooling.

Here's what I posted.

Ok, I wanted to see what this thing can do, and I just happen to be in (actually-legal) posession of a good CFD package. Lucky for me, the geometry is pretty simple, so I set it up just for grins.

I drew the cooler based on the picture on the website, with the cutaway. Geometry may not be perfect, but it's close, and small differences won't matter much.

I made the model the same size (as far as I could tell) as the one on the webpage, and fed it 240 CFM of air at the inlet. Outlet pressure was set to 1 atm. DP was small, so where I set ambient pressure doesn't matter. This would be the installation on the suction to the turbo compressor. Bulb and the in/out tubes were set to a surface temperature of -109 F (the temp of dry ice, or flashed CO2). The bulb will fill with dry ice, not liquid CO2. Mesh was set so it ran in about 20 min on my overclocked Athlon 3200.

I have attached a cutplot of temperature across the symmetry plane, and at the outlet.

Bulk fulid integral values are:

Inlet plane 14.738 psi, 68.0900 F, 0.0753714 lb/ft3

Outlet plane 14.6959 psi, 67.0329 F, 0.0752921 lb/ft3

So it cooled the air a whopping 1 F, but the density went down due to the pressure drop cancelling out the cooling effect.

I wonder what ice chips would do to the turbo? <STYLE type=text/css><!--td.attachrow { font: normal 11px Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color : #000000; border-color : #000000; }td.attachheader { font: normal 11px Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color : #000000; border-color : #000000; background-color: #cfcfcf; }table.attachtable { font: normal 12px Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color : #000000; border-color : #000000; border-collapse : collapse; }--></STYLE>